Publishing Practices of NIH-Funded Facul…

Publishing Practices of NIH-Funded Faculty at MIT :
“Faculty and researchers who receive substantial funding from NIH were interviewed about their publication practices. Qualitative data was collected from interviews of eleven faculty members and one researcher representing six academic departments who received NIH funding. Interview responses were analyzed to identify a representative publication workflow and common themes related to the publication process. The goals of this study were to inform librarians about faculty publication practices; to learn how faculty are affected by and responding to NIH publication policy changes; and to inform planning and discussion about new services to support NIH compliance in addition to general faculty publishing.
Major themes from the interviews included consistency in publishing workflows, but variety in authorship patterns and in data management practices. Significant points of pain for authors included difficulty finding quality reviewers, frustrating submission processes, and discomfort about the implications of publication agreements. Some authors found the NIH submission requirement to be burdensome, but most assumed their publishers were taking care of this process for them. Implications for library services are considered.”
URL : http://www.istl.org/10-summer/refereed2.html

Global Adoption of Electronic Theses and…

Global Adoption of Electronic Theses and Dissertations :
“Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) are a relatively new mode of research and scholarly
communication. Lippincott states that an ETD program provides a process, standards, and software to
automate functions, as well as a digital infrastructure for access and preservation (Lippincott, 2006). As a primary source of information, theses and dissertations are particularly useful to researchers, but many languish in obscurity in university libraries and archives. Digital library technologies have helped ETDs gain momentum (Jin, 2004). Theses submitted in support of a PhD are difficult to access, as they are only collected by the library of the university that granted the degree. ETDs can be easily located, readily accessible, and delivered over the Web (Vijaykumar and Murthy, 2001). Most university libraries are very enthusiastic about electronic theses, but thesis supervisors and university administrators have sometimes been less keen on the idea. In most cases, it is necessary to change university regulations in order to require students to deposit an electronic copy of their thesis, which can be a time-consuming and frustrating process (Greig, 2005). This paper attempts to view the status of use and adoption of ETDs in various different parts of the world, and gives a brief history of ETDs, key issues governing ETD projects, potential merits of ETDs, with a glimpse on ETD initiatives in India.”
URL : http://unllib.unl.edu/LPP/dillip-swain.pdf

Authors publication strategies in schola…

Authors publication strategies in scholarly publishing :
“In this exploratory study, we analyze publishing patterns of authors from different disciplines, as part of a broader analysis of the transformation of the scholarly publishing industry. Although a growing body of literature analyses the author’s role within the process of research production, validation, certification and dissemination, there is little systematic empirical research on publishing patterns; little therefore can be said on relevant issues within the current debate on the future of scholarly publishing such as authors’ responses to (or even awareness of) the growing array of publication possibilities or the speed of adaptation to the increasing series of incentives by funding agencies or academic institutions. On the basis of the analysis of three years of publications gathered in the institutional repository of Università degli Studi di Milano, we highlight trends of publication strategies and different responses to incentive systems. Preliminary results indicate that publication outcomes and intensity differ across disciplines, while similarities occur mainly in terms of choice of preferred outcomes by seniority. Open access is still uncommon among the authors in our sample and it is more utilized by relatively senior authors and active authors.”
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18976/

Understanding the Information Requiremen…

Understanding the Information Requirements of Arts and Humanities Scholarship :
“This paper reports on research of scholarly research practices and requirements conducted in the context of the Preparing DARIAH European e-Infrastructures project, with a view to ensuring current and future fitness for purpose of the planned digital infrastructure, services and tools. It summarises the findings of earlier research, primarily from the field of human information behaviour as applied in scholarly work, it presents a conceptual perspective informed by cultural-historical activity theory, it introduces briefly a formal conceptual model for scholarly research activity compliant with CIDOC CRM, it describes the plan of work and methodology of an empirical research project based on open-questionnaire interviews with arts and humanities researchers, and presents illustrative examples of segmentation, tagging and initial conceptual analysis of the empirical evidence. Finally, it presents plans for future work, consisting, firstly, of a comprehensive re-analysis of interview segments within the framework of the scholarly research activity model, and, secondly, of the integration of this analysis with the extended digital curation process model we presented in earlier work.”
URL : http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/144

Campus perspective on the National Insti…

Campus perspective on the National Institutes of Health public access policy :
“From the Background section: This communication reports the results of a survey conducted in the spring of 2009 to gauge awareness of the NIH public access policy among faculty and other academics at UCSF, as well as their feelings (positive and negative) about the open access movement. The UCSF Library has participated in many efforts in recent years to raise campus awareness about the possibilities of open access publishing, and this survey provided an opportunity to understand how best to focus future outreach to faculty on this topic.”
URL : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2901012/pdf/mlab-98-03-256.pdf

Faculty self-archiving: Motivations and barriers

This study investigated factors that motivate or impede faculty participation in self-archiving practices – the placement of research work in various open access (OA) venues, ranging from personal Web pages to OA archives.

The author’s research design involves triangulation of survey and interview data from 17 Carnegie doctorate universities with DSpace institutional repositories.

The analysis of survey responses from 684 professors and 41 telephone interviews identified seven significant factors: (a) altruism – the idea of providing OA benefits for users; (b) perceived self-archiving culture; (c) copyright concerns; (d) technical skills; (e) age; (f) perception of no harmful impact of self-archiving on tenure and promotion; and (g) concerns about additional time and effort.

The factors are listed in descending order of their effect size. Age, copyright concerns, and additional time and effort are negatively associated with self-archiving, whereas remaining factors are positively related to it.

Faculty are motivated by OA advantages to users, disciplinary norms, and no negative influence on academic reward. However, barriers to self-archiving – concerns about copyright, extra time and effort, technical ability, and age – imply that the provision of services to assist faculty with copyright management, and with technical and logistical issues, could encourage higher rates of self-archiving.

URL : http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123585469/abstract