The status and models of digital publishing :
« This Thesis examines the current impact of digital technology upon certain aspects of the publishing industry, especially the e-book industry. It reviews the key developments in globally digital publishing and sums up several publishing models of digital contents. »
URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10760/16721
Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact :
« Background: Citations in peer-reviewed articles and the impact factor are generally accepted measures of scientific impact. Web 2.0 tools such as Twitter, blogs or social bookmarking tools provide the possibility to construct innovative article-level or journal-level metrics to gauge impact and influence. However, the relationship of the these new metrics to traditional metrics such as citations is not known.
Objective: (1) To explore the feasibility of measuring social impact of and public attention to scholarly articles by analyzing buzz in social media, (2) to explore the dynamics, content, and timing of tweets relative to the publication of a scholarly article, and (3) to explore whether these metrics are sensitive and specific enough to predict highly cited articles.
Methods: Between July 2008 and November 2011, all tweets containing links to articles in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) were mined. For a subset of 1573 tweets about 55 articles published between issues 3/2009 and 2/2010, different metrics of social media impact were calculated and compared against subsequent citation data from Scopus and Google Scholar 17 to 29 months later. A heuristic to predict the top-cited articles in each issue through tweet metrics was validated.
Results: A total of 4208 tweets cited 286 distinct JMIR articles. The distribution of tweets over the first 30 days after article publication followed a power law (Zipf, Bradford, or Pareto distribution), with most tweets sent on the day when an article was published (1458/3318, 43.94% of all tweets in a 60-day period) or on the following day (528/3318, 15.9%), followed by a rapid decay. The Pearson correlations between tweetations and citations were moderate and statistically significant, with correlation coefficients ranging from .42 to .72 for the log-transformed Google Scholar citations, but were less clear for Scopus citations and rank correlations. A linear multivariate model with time and tweets as significant predictors (P < .001) could explain 27% of the variation of citations. Highly tweeted articles were 11 times more likely to be highly cited than less-tweeted articles (9/12 or 75% of highly tweeted article were highly cited, while only 3/43 or 7% of less-tweeted articles were highly cited; rate ratio 0.75/0.07 = 10.75, 95% confidence interval, 3.4–33.6). Top-cited articles can be predicted from top-tweeted articles with 93% specificity and 75% sensitivity.
Conclusions: Tweets can predict highly cited articles within the first 3 days of article publication. Social media activity either increases citations or reflects the underlying qualities of the article that also predict citations, but the true use of these metrics is to measure the distinct concept of social impact. Social impact measures based on tweets are proposed to complement traditional citation metrics. The proposed twimpact factor may be a useful and timely metric to measure uptake of research findings and to filter research findings resonating with the public in real time. »
URL : http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/
Heading for the Open Road: Costs and Benefits of Transitions in Scholarly Communications :
« This paper reports on a study — overseen by representatives of the publishing, library and research funder communities in the UK — investigating the drivers, costs and benefits of potential ways to increase access to scholarly journals. It identifies five different but realistic scenarios for moving towards that end over the next five years, including gold and green open access, moves towards national licensing, publisher-led delayed open access, and transactional models. It then compares and evaluates the benefits as well as the costs and risks for the UK. The scenarios, the comparisons between them, and the modelling on which they are based, amount to a benefit-cost analysis to help in appraising policy options over the next five years. Our conclusion is that policymakers who are seeking to promote increases in access should encourage the use of existing subject and institutional repositories, but avoid pushing for reductions in embargo periods, which might put at risk the sustainability of the underlying scholarly publishing system. They should also promote and facilitate a transition to gold open access, while seeking to ensure that the average level of charges for publication does not exceed circa £2,000; that the rate in the UK of open access publication is broadly in step with the rate in the rest of the world; and that total payments to journal publishers from UK universities and their funders do not rise as a consequence. »
URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/publish/issues/2011-1/index.html?000529
Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success Research Report Version 1.0 :
« Over the past five years, libraries have begun to expand their role in the scholarly publishing value chain by offering a greater range of pre-publication and editorial support services. Given the rapid evolution of these services, there is a clear community need for practical guidance concerning the challenges and opportunities facing library-based publishing programs.
Recognizing that library publishing services represent one part of a complex ecology of scholarly communication, Purdue University Libraries, in collaboration with the Libraries of Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Utah, secured an IMLS National Leadership Grant under the title “Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success.” The project, conducted between October 2010 and September 2011, seeks to advance the professionalism of library-based publishing by identifying successful library publishing strategies and services, highlighting best practices, and recommending priorities for building capacity.
The project has four components: 1) a survey of librarians designed to provide an overview of current practice for library publishing programs (led by consultant October Ivins); 2) a report presenting best practice case studies of the publishing programs at the partner institutions (written by consultant Raym Crow); 3) a series of workshops held at each participating institution to present and discuss the findings of the survey and case studies; and 4) a review of the existing literature on library publishing services. The results of these research threads are pulled together in this project white paper. »
URL : http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/lib_research/136/
Accessible Publishing, Best Practice Guidelines for Publishers :
« Today at the London Book Fair, EDItEUR, the International standards organisation, launched “Accessible Publishing”, a set of best practice guidelines and advice to support publishers around the world in their endeavours to make their books accessible to people with print impairment.
It is estimated that at least 10% of people in the developed world and 15% in the developing world have some degree of print impairment. These may be visual impairments, dyslexia, motor disabilities or age related macular degeneration any of which can seriously affect the ability to read. The publishing landscape is increasingly user-oriented; ensuring published content is accessible by all potential readers is more and more important. Today’s readership needs to be able to consume content using a variety of different technologies and publishing’s metamorphosis from a print-dominated into a mixed and inexorably into a digitally-led industry presents an unprecedented opportunity to offer publications to the widest possible audience. These guidelines encourage publishers to make their mainstream publications as accessible as possible so that full access becomes the norm.
This straightforward document explains how publishers can tackle both the organisational and technical aspects of accessibility. Sarah Hilderley, the author of the guidelines and herself an experienced publisher, points out “We are closer than we sometimes think to being able to make all our publications accessible to a much wider audience. Already, ebook reading devices are making a much wider variety of titles available in “large print” than have ever been available in the past. We can use the flexibility of interface that digital publishing offers us to make mainstream content much more widely accessible than it could ever be in print.”
YS Chi, President of the International Publishers Association, said “While giving priority to accessibility is an important way for publishers to be socially responsible, it can lead to business opportunities as well. It just makes sense.”
The guidelines form part of a joint project, the Enabling Technologies Framework, which EDItEUR is delivering in collaboration with the DAISY Consortium. The framework project is funded by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) under its visually impaired persons (VIP) initiative to facilitate access to copyrighted works for people with print disabilities. The Guidelines have been endorsed by the International Publishers Association, the Federation of European Publishers and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM). »
Press Release : http://www.alpsp.org/ForceDownload.asp?id=1837
Guidelines : http://www.editeur.org/109/Enabling-Technologies-Framework/
Cross-Disciplinary Writers’ Group Stimulates Fresh Approaches to Scholarly Communication: A Reflective Case Study Within a Higher Education Institution in the North West of England :
« For the inexperienced writer it can be difficult to know how to start writing, while for those with some writing experience, it is often seen as a luxury for which there is precious little time to indulge. This reflective case study describes the role of a cross-disciplinary writers’ group, as a writing intervention, within a higher education institution in the North West of England. Established in 2006, the group has always had a librarian as part of its membership and has been informed by the literature on successful writers’ groups. Monthly meetings facilitate ongoing scholarly activity; we share group roles and seek to extend our knowledge of writing practice including writing conference abstracts, constructing an argument, collaborative writing projects, and negotiating authorship. At the inception of the writers’ group, members were seeking to develop their writing portfolio. We are now at various stages of our scholarly development, ranging from early career writers to well published authors and editors. The model of a collaborative writers’ group has provided a winning formula for those wishing to develop scholarly communications as part of their daily activities and has valuable lessons from which academic librarians might learn. »
URL : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a928309394~frm=titlelink
Intellectual Property in Publishing and Research: Open Access in Biotechnology, Life Sciences, and Software :
« We show some of the parallels between three sectors: (i) research, in particular research and scholarly publishing; (ii) software, and the diversity of its rights management ecosystem; and (iii) biotechnology, with its restricted intellectual property ecosystem and declining levels of innovation. A core aspect of the research process is to be found in scholarly publishing. Some of the most advanced forms of scholarly, research publishing, relating to publishing practices including citation, are evident in biotechnology and the life sciences. Motivation for Open Access, for example, is far and away the
most pronounced in the life sciences. We look at how this ties in with the evolution of the management, generally, of intellectual property. Computing, with its basis in computational reasoning, can and should play a central role in this evolution. In fact we can already discern a future view of pharmaceuticals as a new form of software. »
URL : http://www.cepis.org/media/upenet.IV.20101.pdf