Étiquette : scientific practices

Public accessibility of biomedical articles from PubMed Central…

Public accessibility of biomedical articles from PubMed Central reduces journal readership–retrospective cohort analysis :

“Does PubMed Central-a government-run digital archive of biomedical articles-compete with scientific society journals? A longitudinal, retrospective cohort analysis of 13,223 articles (5999 treatment, 7224 control) published in 14 society-run biomedical research journals in nutrition, experimental biology, physiology, and radiology between February 2008 and January 2011 reveals a 21.4% reduction in full-text hypertext markup language (HTML) article downloads and a 13.8% reduction in portable document format (PDF) article downloads from the journals’ websites when U.S. National Institutes of Health-sponsored articles (treatment) become freely available from the PubMed Central repository. In addition, the effect of PubMed Central on reducing PDF article downloads is increasing over time, growing at a rate of 1.6% per year. There was no longitudinal effect for full-text HTML downloads. While PubMed Central may be providing complementary access to readers traditionally underserved by scientific journals, the loss of article readership from the journal website may weaken the ability of the journal to build communities of interest around research papers, impede the communication of news and events to scientific society members and journal readers, and reduce the perceived value of the journal to institutional subscribers.”

URL : http://www.fasebj.org/content/early/2013/04/02/fj.13-229922.full.pdf

The Determinants of Open Access Publishing Survey Evidence…

The Determinants of Open Access Publishing: Survey Evidence from Germany :

“We discuss the results of a survey conducted in fall 2012 and covering 2,151 researchers in Germany. We show that there are significant differences between the scientific disciplines with respect to researcher’s awareness of and experience with both open access (OA) journals and self-archiving. Our results reveal that the relevance of OA within a discipline may explain why researchers from particular disciplines do (not) publish OA. Besides, several aspects like copyright law, age, profession or the inherent reward system of a discipline play a role. As a consequence, the paper emphasizes that a “one-size-fits-all” approach as promoted by most recent policy approaches is little promising for providing an effective framework for shaping the future of scholarly publishing.”

URL : http://ssrn.com/abstract=2232675

The value of scholarly reading in the life…

The value of scholarly reading in the life sciences :

“Surveys of academic staff in six universities in the U.K. provide insights for publishers and universities into scholarly article, book, and other publication reading patterns of academics and differences based on academic discipline of readers. These surveys were part of the 2011 UK Scholarly Reading and the Value of the Library Study funded by JISC Collections and based on Tenopir and King Studies conducted since 1977. Reading patterns of life and environmental scientists differ from other disciplines, in particular social sciences. Scholarly articles, especially those obtained from the library’s e-journal collections, are vital to the work of all academic disciplines. Life and environmental scient-ists come into contact with multiple sources of information every day, including social media, and the biggest limitation scientists describe when it comes to finding and obtaining articles is cost and time. Knowing more about academic reading patterns help publishers and librarians design more effective journal systems and services now and into the future.”

URL : http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/IEE/article/view/4484

Use of blogs, Twitter and Facebook by PhD Students for Scholarly Communication: A UK study

This study explores scholarly use of social media by PhD researchers through mix-methods of qualitative interviews, participant observation and content analysis of a case study #phdchat.

We found that blogs, Twitter and Facebook are among the most popular social media tools being used by researchers. They can be used by PhD students and early career researchers to benefit their scholarly communication practice, promote their professional profiles, disseminate their work to a wider audience quickly, and gain feedbacks and support from peers across the globe.

There are also difficulties and potential problems such as the lack of standards and incentives, the risks of idea being pinched and plagiarism, lack of knowledge of how to start and maintain using social media tool and the potential huge amount of time and effort needed to invest.

We found that respondents link different social media tools together to maximise the impact of the content disseminated, as well as to create a personal learning network (PLN) connected with people across the globe.

For privacy issue, the participants use different identities on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is usually set as private with access for friends only and Twitter is public and used for professional purposes.

However, Facebook page and groups can be public which are used to build a community and disseminate information without revealing much content from individual member’s personal profile.”

URL : https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/item/?pid=uk-ac-man-scw:187789

Collaboration scientifique et citations des articles Quelles pratiques…

Collaboration scientifique et citations des articles : Quelles pratiques dans les revues médicales ? :

“Objectifs : La meilleure façon de caractériser la collaboration scientifique est d’étudier la co-signature des articles. Deux indicateurs sont intéressants : le nombre d’auteurs et son caractère international. L’objectif est d’étudier la corrélation entre ces deux indicateurs et le nombre de citations.

Méthodes : Nous avons sélectionné deux journaux de pharmacie et médecine afin de comparer les pratiques. Nous avons utilisé un échantillon d’environ 800 articles publiés entre 2002 et 2005 dont nous avons collecté les citations jusqu’en 2010. Nous avons transformé nos variables numériques, nombre d’auteurs et nombre de citations, en variables qualitatives.

Résultats : Les variables «auteurs» et «citations» ne sont pas indépendantes.

Conclusions. Les articles les moins cités sont souvent publiés par un seul auteur ou par une équipe très réduite alors que le caractère international des articles est un facteur qui en général augmente le nombre de citations. Cette micro-analyse a permis également de mieux appréhender certaines pratiques éditoriales.”

URL : http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00775307

Science 3.0: Corrections to the “Science 2.0” paradigm

The concept of “Science 2.0” was introduced almost a decade ago to describe the new generation of online-based tools for researchers allowing easier data sharing, collaboration and publishing.

Although technically sound, the concept still does not work as expected. Here we provide a systematic line of arguments to modify the concept of Science 2.0, making it more consistent with the spirit and traditions of science and Internet.

Our first correction to the Science 2.0 paradigm concerns the open-access publication models charging fees to the authors. As discussed elsewhere, we reiterate that the monopoly of such publishing models increases biases and inequalities in the representation of scientific ideas based on the author’s income.

Our second correction concerns post-publication comments online, which are all essentially non-anonymous in the current Science 2.0 paradigm.

We conclude that scientific post-publication discussions require special anonymization systems.

We further analyze the reasons of the failure of the current post-publication peer-review models and suggest what needs to be changed in “Science 3.0” to convert Internet into a large “journal club”.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.2522

Neither digital or open Just researchers Views on…

Neither digital or open. Just researchers: Views on digital/open scholarship practices in an Italian university :

“How do university researchers consider attributes such as ‘digital’ and ‘open’ as regards to their research practices? This article reports a small–scale interview project carried out at the University of Milan, aiming to probe whether and to what extent actual digital research practices are affecting cultures of sharing in different subject areas and are prompting emergent approaches such as open publishing, open data, open education and open boundary between academia and society. Most of the 14 interviewed researchers seem not to see any clear benefit to move to further technological means or new open practices and call for institutional support and rules. However, a few profiles of ‘digital, networked and open’ researchers stand out and show both a self–legitimating approach to new modes of knowledge production and distribution and a particular sensitiveness towards values and perspectives driven by ‘openness’ in digital networks.”

URL : http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3881