A Review of Theory and Practice in Scientometrics

Publié le 25 janvier 2015 par Hans Dillaerts

« Scientometrics is the study of the quantitative aspects of the process of science as a communication system. It is centrally, but not only, concerned with the analysis of citations in the academic literature. In recent years it has come to play a major role in the measurement and evaluation of research performance. In this review we consider: the historical development of scientometrics, sources of citation data, citation metrics and the « laws » of scientometrics, normalisation, journal impact factors and other journal metrics, visualising and mapping science, evaluation and policy, and future developments. »

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.05462

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Issues in Open Research Data

Publié le 24 janvier 2015 par Hans Dillaerts

« In 2010 the Panton Principles for Open Data in Science were published. These principles were founded upon the idea that ‘Science is based on building on, reusing and openly criticising the published body of scientific knowledge’ (http://pantonprinciples.org) and they provide a succinct list of the fundamentals to observe when making your data open. Intended for a broad audience of academics, publishers and librarians, Issues in Research Data explores the implications of the Panton Principles through a number of perspectives on open research data in the sciences and beyond.

The book features chapters by open data experts in a range of academic disciplines, covering practical information on licensing, ethics, and advice for data curators, alongside more theoretical issues surrounding the adoption of open data. As the book is open access, each chapter can stand alone from the main volume so that communities can host, distribute, build upon and remix the content that is relevant to them. »

URL : http://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/moore2014.pdf

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/ban

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Knowledge Unlatched: A Global Library Consortium Model for Funding Open Access Scholarly Books

Publié le 24 janvier 2015 par Hans Dillaerts

« This special issue of Cultural Science Journal is devoted to the report of a groundbreaking experiment in re-coordinating global markets for specialist scholarly books and enabling the knowledge commons: the Knowledge Unlatched proof-of-concept pilot. The pilot took place between January 2012 and September 2014. It involved libraries, publishers, authors, readers and research funders in the process of developing and testing a global library consortium model for supporting Open Access books. The experiment established that authors, librarians, publishers and research funding agencies can work together in powerful new ways to enable open access; that doing so is cost effective; and that a global library consortium model has the potential dramatically to widen access to the knowledge and ideas contained in book-length scholarly works. »

URL : http://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/96-625-1-PB.pdf

Alternative URL : http://cultural-science.org/journal/index.php/culturalscience/article/view/96

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Incentives and motivations for sharing research data: researcher’s perspectives

Publié le 24 janvier 2015 par Hans Dillaerts

« This study, commissioned by Knowledge Exchange, has gathered evidence, examples and opinions on current and future incentives for research data sharing from the researcher’s point of view, in order to provide recommendations for policy and practice development on how best to incentivise data access and reuse. Whilst most researchers appreciate the benefits of sharing research data, on an individual basis they may be reluctant to share their own data. This study is based on qualitative interviews with 22 selected researchers of five research teams that have established data sharing cultures, in the partner countries of Knowledge Exchange: Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The five case studies span various academic disciplines: arts and humanities, social sciences, biomedicine, chemistry and biology. »

URL : Incentives and motivations for sharing research data: researcher’s perspectives

Alternative URL : http://knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=733

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Monographs and Open Access : A report to HEFCE

Publié le 24 janvier 2015 par Hans Dillaerts

« This report examines, and seeks to clarify, the range of issues that emerge when we think about the relationship between open access and monographs (including under this latter term other long scholarly publications). It arises from the immediate need of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), and its sister funding councils in the UK, to examine the issues for open access in relation to books in a context where both funding and research councils in the UK have already established open-access requirements for publications in journals and conference proceedings, but the issues are much greater than those of defining the practicalities of mandates and the sustainability of open-access models. Furthermore, although the principal focus of the report is defined by the culture and policy preoccupations of higher education in this country, the international character of research, publishing, and academic careers has to be acknowledged. »

URL : http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/hefce/content/pubs/indirreports/2015/monographsandopenaccess/2014_monographs.pdf

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Availability and accessibility in an open access institutional repository: a case study

Publié le 20 janvier 2015 par Hans Dillaerts

« Introduction. This study explores the extent to which an institutional repository (IR) makes papers available and accessible on the open web by using 170 journal articles housed in DigiNole Commons, the IR at Florida State University.

Method. To analyze the IR’s impact on availability and accessibility, we conducted independent known-item title searches on both Google and Google Scholar (GS) to search for faculty publications housed in DigiNole Commons.

Analysis. The extent to which the IR makes articles available and accessible was measured quantitatively, and the findings that cannot be summarized with numbers were analyzed qualitatively.

Results. Google and GS searches provided links to DigiNole metadata for a total of 145 (85.3%) of 170 items, and to full texts for 96 (96%) of 100 items. With one exception, access to either metadata or full text required no more than three clicks.

Conclusions. Overall, the results confirm the contribution of the IR in making papers available and accessible. The results also reveal some impediments to the success of OA: including impediments linked to contractual arrangements between authors and publishers, impediments linked to policies, practices, and technologies governing the IR itself, and the low level of faculty participation in the IR. »

URL : http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/slis_faculty_publications/27/

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Data without Peer: Examples of Data Peer Review in the Earth Sciences

Publié le 16 janvier 2015 par Hans Dillaerts

« Peer review of data is an important process if data is to take its place as a first class research output. Much has been written about the theoretical aspects of peer review, but not as much about the actual process of doing it. This paper takes an experimental view, and selects seven datasets, all from the Earth Sciences and with DOIs from DataCite, and attempts to review them, with varying levels of success. Key issues identified from these case studies include the necessity of human readable metadata, accessibility of datasets, and permanence of links to and accessibility of metadata stored in other locations. »

URL : http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january15/callaghan/01callaghan.html

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Science 2.0 Repositories: Time for a Change in Scholarly Communication

Publié le 16 janvier 2015 par Hans Dillaerts

« Information and communication technology (ICT) advances in research infrastructures are continuously changing the way research and scientific communication are performed. Scientists, funders, and organizations are moving the paradigm of « research publishing » well beyond traditional articles. The aim is to pursue an holistic approach where publishing includes any product (e.g. publications, datasets, experiments, software, web sites, blogs) resulting from a research activity and relevant to the interpretation, evaluation, and reuse of the activity or part of it. The implementation of this vision is today mainly inspired by literature scientific communication workflows, which separate the « where » research is conducted from the « where » research is published and shared. In this paper we claim that this model cannot fit well with scientific communication practice envisaged in Science 2.0 settings. We present the idea of Science 2.0 Repositories (SciRepos), which meet publishing requirements arising in Science 2.0 by blurring the distinction between research life-cycle and research publishing. SciRepos interface with the ICT services of research infrastructures to intercept and publish research products while providing researchers with social networking tools for discovery, notification, sharing, discussion, and assessment of research products. »

URL : http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january15/assante/01assante.html

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Making open access work for authors, institutions and publishers

Publié le 16 janvier 2015 par Hans Dillaerts

« This report arises from a roundtable event hosted by Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) at University College London on 6 October 2014. The roundtable brought together representatives from academic institutions, publishers and vendors to discuss the challenge of “making open access work”.

Recent policy changes in the United Kingdom are driving a rapid increase in the number of article processing charges, or APCs, being paid to publishers in order to make articles open access. The attendees gathered to discuss the challenges faced by their organizations as APC volumes rise, and to explore the role that third-party vendors such as CCC can play in helping to address these. Discussions during the course of the day covered a wide range of issues. Institutions and publishers offered a range of different perspectives, but there was a striking commonality in the challenges faced, and a high degree of consensus on what is needed to address them:
Author engagement – Author engagement is crucial to the success of open access, but the complexity of the process at present means many need support at an early stage. This requires a fundamental shift from a two-way relationship between author and publisher, to a three- or four-way relationship that also involves the institution and potentially an external funder.
Streamlining the APC process – Workflows for handling APCs remain unstable, with institutions and publishers both grappling with the need to constantly adapt processes and systems as volumes rise. Greater consistency and automation is needed if efficiencies are to be achieved.
Copyright and licensing – Authors lack familiarity with the range of licensing options available and the licensing requirements of funders. Direct engagement between publishers and institutional  administrators can help address this in the short term, but in the long term authors must be equipped to make informed licensing choices that take account of funder mandates.
Management and billing of APCs – The payment of individual APC invoices is not a sustainable solution for either institutions or publishers, but some institutions have concerns over a loss of transparency where alternative models are used. The complex relationships among APC pricing, subscription revenues, licensing, and embargo periods remain a subject for debate.
Standards and interoperability – The need to improve sharing of information through development of common vocabularies and data standards was universally agreed. Identification of suitable persistent identifiers is part of the solution, but even where these exist low levels of uptake remain a concern.
Reporting and compliance – Achieving compliance with funder requirements places a significant burden on institutional administrators, and results in growing demands for information from publishers. »

URL : http://www.copyright.com/content/dam/cc3/marketing/documents/pdfs/Report-Making-Open-Access-Work.pdf

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Will Open Access Get Me Cited? An Analysis of the Efficacy of Open Access Publishing in Political Science

Publié le 14 janvier 2015 par Hans Dillaerts

« The digital revolution has made it easier for political scientists to share and access high-quality research online. However, many articles are stored in proprietary databases that some institutions cannot afford. High-quality, peer-reviewed, top-tier journal articles that have been made open access (OA) (i.e., freely available online) theoretically should be accessed and cited more easily than articles of similar quality that are available only to paying customers. Research into the efficacy of OA publishing thus far has focused mainly on the natural sciences, and the results have been mixed. Because OA has not been as widely adopted in the social sciences, disciplines such as political science have received little attention in the OA research. In this article, we seek to determine the efficacy of OA in political science. Our primary hypothesis is that OA articles will be cited at higher rates than articles that are toll access (TA), which means available only to paying customers. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the mean citation rates of OA and TA articles from eight top-ranked political science journals. We find that OA publication results in a clear citation advantage in political science publishing. »

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1049096514001668

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