Science 2.0 Repositories: Time for a Change in Scholarly Communication

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“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

Indian research going global: A study on the status of open access publishing

Aims to measure quantitatively the scholarly journals which were produced with full immediate open access (OA) from 2003 to 2013. Focuses on the amount of India’s contribution to scholarly literature through the repositories of their institutions, amount of literature produced in various disciplines and the open source software’s (OSS) used for it.

Aims to know the current status of open access publishing in India. A survey of the open access journals indexed in the Directory of Open access Journals (DOAJ) and the repositories indexed in the Open DOAR is followed for this study. India started making its journals open access in 2003 with about 13 journals in a year and has reached about 197 journals till September 2013, which shows a growth of 15 fold of the open access journal output within a year.

The percentage of the multidisciplinary repositories is highest with 43% and the repositories of the disciplines such as Technology, Chemistry and Chemical Technology and Physics and Astronomy are 18%, 15% and 14% respectively among the 64 repositories listed in OpenDOAR.

With about 650 open access journals and about 64 open access directories, India has made important contributions towards the growth of Open access publishing.

URL : http://www.spoars.org/journal/v3n4p4

Digitization, Internet publishing and the revival of scholarly monographs: An empirical study in India

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“This research shows the growing utility of internet-based digital models in reviving the crisis-stricken traditional print monograph publishing. The rising prices of scientific journals in the past three decades forced academic and research libraries to resort to cutbacks on monograph budgets. The declining sales to libraries and rising production costs led to a significant drop in global demand for print monographs, rendering monograph publishing financially unattractive. Combining the flexibility of digitized content with the global reach of the Internet, three emerging digital models — print on demand, bundled e-books, and e-consortia — are beginning to revamp the monograph publishing business.”

URL : http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4932

Dark Research: information content in many modern research papers is not easily discoverable online

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Background: Research is published in indexed, online scholarly journals so that published knowledge can be easily found and built upon by others. Most scholars rely on relatively few online indexing service providers to search for relevant scholarly content. It is under-appreciated that the quality of indexing can vary across different journals and that this can have an adverse effect on the quality of research.

Objective: In this short paper I compare the recall of commonly used online indexers; Google Scholar, Web of Knowledge, Scopus, Microsoft Academic Search and Mendeley Search against a selection of over 20,000 papers published in two different high-volume journals: PLOS ONE and Zootaxa.

Results: When using Google Scholar, content in Zootaxa has low recall for search terms that are known to occur in it, significantly lower than the near-perfect recall of the same terms in PLOS ONE. All other indexers tend to have lower recall than Google Scholar except Scopus which outperformed Google Scholar for recall on Zootaxa searches. I also elaborate why Dark Research is undesirable for optimal scientific progress with some recommendations for change.

Conclusion: This research is a basic proof-of-concept which demonstrates that when searching for published scholarly content, relevant studies can remain hidden as ’Dark Research’ in poorly-indexed journals, even despite expertise-informed efforts to find the content. The technological capability to do full text indexing on all modern scholarly journal content certainly exists, it is perhaps just publisher-imposed access-restrictions on content that prevents this from happening.”

URL : Dark Research: information content in many modern research papers is not easily discoverable online

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.773v1

Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot

The emergence of the web has fundamentally affected most aspects of information communication, including scholarly communication. The immediacy that characterizes publishing information to the web, as well as accessing it, allows for a dramatic increase in the speed of dissemination of scholarly knowledge. But, the transition from a paper-based to a web-based scholarly communication system also poses challenges. In this paper, we focus on reference rot, the combination of link rot and content drift to which references to web resources included in Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) articles are subject.

We investigate the extent to which reference rot impacts the ability to revisit the web context that surrounds STM articles some time after their publication. We do so on the basis of a vast collection of articles from three corpora that span publication years 1997 to 2012. For over one million references to web resources extracted from over 3.5 million articles, we determine whether the HTTP URI is still responsive on the live web and whether web archives contain an archived snapshot representative of the state the referenced resource had at the time it was referenced.

We observe that the fraction of articles containing references to web resources is growing steadily over time. We find one out of five STM articles suffering from reference rot, meaning it is impossible to revisit the web context that surrounds them some time after their publication. When only considering STM articles that contain references to web resources, this fraction increases to seven out of ten. We suggest that, in order to safeguard the long-term integrity of the web-based scholarly record, robust solutions to combat the reference rot problem are required. In conclusion, we provide a brief insight into the directions that are explored with this regard in the context of the Hiberlink project.

URL : Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0115253

Episciences IAM: un projet éditorial entre rupture et continuité

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“Avec le lancement de deux revues scientifiques, Episciences IAM (Informatics and Applied Mathematics) s’engage dans la voie des épi-journaux. Le principe du projet est de publier des résultats scientifiques labellisés par des revues du meilleur niveau. Il s’agit de contribuer à l’édition en Open Access pour un accès libre plus équitable. Au moyen d’une plateforme technique, des contributions scientifiques déjà en archive ouverte sont soumises à un processus d’évaluation et de validation scientifiques. Conçu à terme comme une infrastructure de recherche inter-établissements, le projet Episciences IAM s’appuie sur la plateforme Episciences, développée et hébergée par le CCSD du CNRS.”

URL : http://icoa2014.sciencesconf.org/37934

Perception du libre accès et facteurs d’appropriation des archives ouvertes en contexte français: étude comparée de deux communautés disciplinaires contrastées

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“Cette proposition s’intéresse aux facteurs d’appropriation des archives ouvertes pour deux communautés scientifiques distinctes (économie, sciences de la mer), dans le contexte français. S’appuyant sur deux études de terrains contrastés, ce travail interroge notamment la variable disciplinaire ainsi que la complémentarité entre logiques de communauté et logiques institutionnelles, permettant de dégager des apports structurels transférables à d’autres contextes.”

URL : http://icoa2014.sciencesconf.org/37822