scientific communication – Page 171

Publish, not Perish: Supporting Graduate Students as Aspiring Authors

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“BACKGROUND Students pursuing advanced degrees are increasingly expected to contribute to their discipline’s scholarly discourse during their tenure in graduate school. However, they are often unsure of how or where to begin the publishing process, and do not always feel comfortable asking for help from their faculty advisors or fellow students. Scholars, including librarians, have attempted to address these concerns by developing tools and services to meet the needs of future faculty. In recent years, university presses and research libraries have recognized their shared mission in furthering scholarship, with libraries themselves offering publishing education and expertise.

PROJECT OVERVIEW During the 2012-2013 academic year, subject librarians and publishing professionals at the University of Michigan Library crafted a program to address students’ questions and concerns about the publishing lifecycle. This ongoing initiative includes a multi-semester workshop series developed in concert with faculty from departments throughout campus, as well as a supplementary online toolkit that takes into account the rapidly evolving nature of scholarly communication.

LESSONS LEARNED Major takeaways from this program include: the value of student assessment in shaping publishing workshops; awareness of the discrepancies of registration numbers and actual attendance, highlighting the potential for enhanced promotion techniques; the importance of university press and faculty insight; and the benefits of collaboration among librarians, publishing professionals, and faculty members.

NEXT STEPS Future iterations of this program will incorporate in-depth assessment of each program, a more interactive learning environment, and better scheduling and promotion of the workshop series.”

URL : Publish, not Perish: Supporting Graduate Students as Aspiring Authors

Alternative URL : http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol2/iss3/7/

Building a Bridge Between Journal Articles and Research Data: The PKP-Dataverse Integration Project

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“A growing number of funding agencies and international scholarly organizations are requesting that research data be made more openly available to help validate and advance scientific research. Thus, this is an opportune moment for research data repositories to partner with journal editors and publishers in order to simplify and improve data curation and publishing practices. One practical example of this type of cooperation is currently being facilitated by a two year (2012-2014) one million dollar Sloan Foundation grant, integrating two well-established open source systems: the Public Knowledge Project’s (PKP) Open Journal Systems (OJS), developed by Stanford University and Simon Fraser University; and Harvard University’s Dataverse Network web application, developed by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS). To help make this interoperability possible, an OJS Dataverse plugin and Data Deposit API are being developed, which together will allow authors to submit their articles and datasets through an existing journal management interface, while the underlying data are seamlessly deposited into a research data repository, such as the Harvard Dataverse. This practice paper will provide an overview of the project, and a brief exploration of some of the specific challenges to and advantages of this integration.”

URL : Building a Bridge Between Journal Articles and Research Data

Alternative URL : http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/9.1.176

Cross-Linking Between Journal Publications and Data Repositories: A Selection of Examples

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“This article provides a selection of examples of the many ways that a link can be made between a journal article (whether in a data journal or otherwise) and a dataset held in a data repository. In some cases the method of linking is well established, while in others, they have yet to be rolled out uniformly across the journal landscape. We explore ways in which these examples might be implemented in a data journal, such as Geoscience Data Journal, as explored by the PREPARDE project.”

URL : Cross-Linking Between Journal Publications and Data Repositories

Alternative URL : http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/9.1.164

Publishing and Pushing: Mixing Models for Communicating Research Data in Archaeology

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“We present a case study of data integration and reuse involving 12 researchers who published datasets in Open Context, an online data publishing platform, as part of collaborative archaeological research on early domesticated animals in Anatolia. Our discussion reports on how different editorial and collaborative review processes improved data documentation and quality, and created ontology annotations needed for comparative analyses by domain specialists. To prepare data for shared analysis, this project adapted editor-supervised review and revision processes familiar to conventional publishing, as well as more novel models of revision adapted from open source software development of public version control. Preparing the datasets for publication and analysis required significant investment of effort and expertise, including archaeological domain knowledge and familiarity with key ontologies. To organize this work effectively, we emphasized these different models of collaboration at various stages of this data publication and analysis project. Collaboration first centered on data editors working with data contributors, then widened to include other researchers who provided additional peer-review feedback, and finally the widest research community, whose collaboration is facilitated by GitHub’s version control system. We demonstrate that the “publish” and “push” models of data dissemination need not be mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they can play complementary roles in sharing high quality data in support of research. This work highlights the value of combining multiple models in different stages of data dissemination.”

URL : Publishing and Pushing: Mixing Models for Communicating Research Data in Archaeology

Alternative URL : http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/9.1.57

Open access and online journals in orthopaedics : What does the future hold ?

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“Introduction: Open access journalism has expanded in the last two decades, with increasing titles in all medical specialties, including orthopaedic surgery. No study has evaluated the impact of open access orthopaedic journals or their associated risks and benefits to academic publishing and patient care.
Methods: This study evaluated open access orthopaedic journals utilizing various databases including the Directly of Open Access Journals (www.DOAJ.org), PubMed Central (www.PubMed.org), Google search queries and recent articles, stories, and editorials on the topic of open access journalism. All orthopaedic surgery journals were recorded, as well as associated characteristics including publisher, year of publication, articles and issues per year, impact factor, and potential risk of a “predatory” publisher. Data were summarized and presented.
Results: Our search yielded a total of 42 orthopaedic open access journals in the English language from 30 different publishers. In total, there were nearly 13,000 articles available from these journals available without a license or subscription. Of the 42 journals, 13 (31%) were considered predatory or borderline publishers, and only one had a published impact factor (IF = 0.737). In contrast, 8 of the remaining 29 journals (28%) had a published impact factor with a mean value of 1.788 (range: 0.597-4.302).
Conclusion: Open access publishing is a rising trend in the orthopaedic literature, and allows for free, public and international availability of research findings. Like any new technology, open access is not without its faults, and critics have appropriately raised concerns about academic integrity and profiteering by certain publishers. Researchers and surgeons alike are responsible for maintaining the quality of the orthopaedic literature, by participating in the peer review process and avoiding the temptation to publish quickly.”

URL : http://www.coa.org/docs/2014AnnualMeeting/9FrankoOrrinOpenAccessOrthopaedics.pdf

Evaluating big deal journal bundles

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“Large commercial publishers sell bundled online subscriptions to their entire list of academic journals at prices significantly lower than the sum of their á la carte prices. Bundle prices differ drastically between institutions, but they are not publicly posted. The data that we have collected enable us to compare the bundle prices charged by commercial publishers with those of nonprofit societies and to examine the types of price discrimination practiced by commercial and nonprofit journal publishers. This information is of interest to economists who study monopolist pricing, librarians interested in making efficient use of library budgets, and scholars who are interested in the availability of the work that they publish.”

URL : http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/PNAS-2014-Bergstrom-1403006111.pdf

EPISCIENCES – an overlay publication platform

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This paper delineates the main characteristics of the Episciences platform, an environment for overlay peer-reviewing that complements existing publication repositories, designed by the Centre pour la Communication Scientifique directe (CCSD ) service unit. We describe the main characteristics of the platform and present the first experiment of launching two journals in the computer science domain onto it. Finally, we address a series of open questions related to the actual changes in editorial models (open submission, open peer- review, augmented publication) that such a platform is likely to raise, as well as some hints as to the underlying business model.

URL : http://hal.inria.fr/hal-01002815