février 2012 – Page 2 – InfoDoc MicroVeille

Publication of NIH funded trials registered in ClinicalTrials…

Posté le 21 février 2012 par Hans Dillaerts

Publication of NIH funded trials registered in ClinicalTrials.gov: cross sectional analysis :

“Objective To review patterns of publication of clinical trials funded by US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in peer reviewed biomedical journals indexed by Medline.

Design Cross sectional analysis.

Setting Clinical trials funded by NIH and registered within ClinicalTrials.gov (clinicaltrials.gov), a trial registry and results database maintained by the US National Library of Medicine, after 30 September 2005 and updated as having been completed by 31 December 2008, allowing at least 30 months for publication after completion of the trial.

Main outcome measures Publication and time to publication in the biomedical literature, as determined through Medline searches, the last of which was performed in June 2011.

Results Among 635 clinical trials completed by 31 December 2008, 294 (46%) were published in a peer reviewed biomedical journal, indexed by Medline, within 30 months of trial completion. The median period of follow-up after trial completion was 51 months (25th-75th centiles 40-68 months), and 432 (68%) were published overall. Among published trials, the median time to publication was 23 months (14-36 months). Trials completed in either 2007 or 2008 were more likely to be published within 30 months of study completion compared with trials completed before 2007 (54% (196/366) v 36% (98/269); P<0.001).

Conclusions Despite recent improvement in timely publication, fewer than half of trials funded by NIH are published in a peer reviewed biomedical journal indexed by Medline within 30 months of trial completion. Moreover, after a median of 51 months after trial completion, a third of trials remained unpublished.”

URL : http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.d7292
doi: 10.1136/bmj.d7292

Electronic doctoral theses in the UK a sector…

Posté le 20 février 2012 par Hans Dillaerts

Electronic doctoral theses in the UK: a sector-wide survey into policies, practice and barriers to Open Access :

“Sharing knowledge and research outputs is critical to the progress of science and human development, and a central tenet of academia. The Internet itself is a product of the academic community, and opening access to that community’s most important body of research, doctoral theses, is both a logical and an inevitable development. Progress toward open access to electronic theses has been slow in the UK. Much has been written on the perceived barriers and practical/infrastructural considerations that might explain this, but a comprehensive picture of that progress, and obstacles to it, was lacking. In 2010, a survey of policy and practice in UK HEIs was conducted by UCL (University College London) Library Services (commissioned by the Joint Information Systems Committee, JISC) to address this very issue. Incorporating inputs from 144 institutions currently awarding doctoral degrees, the work provides the first clear and detailed picture of the status of open access to doctoral research in the UK. The mission of the UK Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE) is to promote and support the interests of graduate education, and this it does through dissemination of best practice and intelligence on emergent trends; helping to shape policy and practice for the benefit of the UK HEI sector. This report contributes to that mission by bringing to the membership’s attention the results of this important work by UCL Library Services; a collaboration between UKCGE and the authors of the original work, it sets out the policies and practices that emerged from the survey and also considers what has been learned about the perceived barriers to the implementation of open access to electronic theses.

The 2010 survey has enabled, for the first time, a differentiation to be made between barriers that are “real” and those which are unfounded and/or yet to be properly validated. At the same time, the work highlights the progress made in certain critical areas, as well as those that require our greater attention. A positive picture emerges for the UK on the adoption of the electronic thesis, with the majority of HEIs surveyed expected to be providing open access to their theses in five years’ time. A more detailed picture also emerges regarding the primary reasons for requests to restrict access to theses, some of which, notably, apply only to electronic (not print) theses. This has necessarily given rise to new policy developments. There is positive evidence also of collaboration among HEIs to provide an efficient and robust service for accessing electronic theses; pooling their resources and expertise either in the development of their institutional repositories or in operating a joint service. The key driver of open access to electronic theses is the opportunity for UK HEIs to “showcase” their research outputs to the widest possible audience and enhance their impact. There are no reliable means as yet to measure this impact, but there are encouraging early indications that electronic doctoral theses attract significant attention when made openly accessible. Open access to electronic theses may therefore indeed accelerate the sharing of knowledge and the progress of scientific discovery and human development.”

URL : http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1339905/

De l’open access au freemium

Posté le 19 février 2012 par Hans Dillaerts

De l’open access au freemium :

Scalable Infrastructure for coupling Research Data to Publications in the Life Sciences

Posté le 16 février 2012 par Hans Dillaerts

How the Scientific Community Reacts to Newly Submitted…

Posté le 15 février 2012 par Hans Dillaerts

How the Scientific Community Reacts to Newly Submitted Preprints: Article Downloads, Twitter Mentions, and Citations :

“We analyze the online response of the scientific community to the preprint publication of scholarly articles. We employ a cohort of 4,606 scientific articles submitted to the preprint database arXiv.org between October 2010 and April 2011. We study three forms of reactions to these preprints: how they are downloaded on the arXiv.org site, how they are mentioned on the social media site Twitter, and how they are cited in the scholarly record. We perform two analyses. First, we analyze the delay and time span of article downloads and Twitter mentions following submission, to understand the temporal configuration of these reactions and whether significant differences exist between them. Second, we run correlation tests to investigate the relationship between Twitter mentions and both article downloads and article citations. We find that Twitter mentions follow rapidly after article submission and that they are correlated with later article downloads and later article citations, indicating that social media may be an important factor in determining the scientific impact of an article.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.2461

How Linking Changes the Role of Library…

Posté le 10 février 2012 par Hans Dillaerts

“How Linking Changes the Role of Library Data: Examples from the Wider World” :

“Discussion in the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group (2010-2011) tended to focus on the benefits of linked-data technology to libraries. This talk explores how library data – datasets, element sets, and value vocabularies – when linked, provide new forms of support to scholarly and cultural communities in the wider world. Well-maintained value vocabularies, their concepts identified by URI and backed by institutional persistence policies, can function as magnets, forming hubs of incoming links from thousands of providers. The global agricultural research community maintains a key thesaurus, AGROVOC, through an effort distributed across multiple language areas. Its linked data strategy aims at solutions that will work in low-resource and low-bandwidth conditions and at tools that can use natural-language processing to assign appropriate URIs and automate the “triplification” of existing data (“wrapping the legacy”).

In the library world, the standards underpinning bibliographic description, such as ISBD, FRBR, FRAD, FRSAD, and RDA, are being translated into the language of linked data. Triplified standards provide building blocks for descriptive practice based not on fixed records, but on statements that can be differently recombined and bundled for diverse, even unanticipated, uses – aggregated “just in time” instead of being maintained “just in case”. As for other artifacts of long-term cultural importance, libraries could play a key role in preserving the underlying vocabularies, ensuring their long-term usefulness as the “footnotes” of library data.”