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Open Access Information Service for Researchers in Theology

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Author : Marianne Dörr

Tübingen University Library offers a continuously improved next generation bibliographic database for theology and religious studies. The “Index theologicus” database is available worldwide in open access.

It is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) in the funding program “specialised information services”. This paper informs about the background of the project and the steps the Library took in order to transform a legacy online content database system into one of the most important international bibliographies in theology without increasing the number of staff involved.

URL : Open Access Information Service for Researchers in Theology

DOI : http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10245

Research collaboration and productivity: is there correlation?

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Authors : Giovanni Abramo, Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo, Flavia Di Costa

The incidence of extramural collaboration in academic research activities is increasing as a result of various factors. These factors include policy measures aimed at fostering partnership and networking among the various components of the research system, policies which are in turn justified by the idea that knowledge sharing could increase the effectiveness of the system.

Over the last two decades, the scientific community has also stepped up activities to assess the actual impact of collaboration intensity on the performance of research systems.

This study draws on a number of empirical analyses, with the intention of measuring the effects of extramural collaboration on research performance and, indirectly, verifying the legitimacy of policies that support this type of collaboration.

The analysis focuses on the Italian academic research system. The aim of the work is to assess the level of correlation, at institutional level, between scientific productivity and collaboration intensity as a whole, both internationally and with private organizations.

This will be carried out using a bibliometric type of approach, which equates collaboration with the co-authorship of scientific publications.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.07847

Academic E-book Usability from the Student’s Perspective

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Authors : Esta Tovstiadi, Natalia Tingle, Gabrielle Wiersma

Objective

This article describes how librarians systematically compared different e-book platforms to identify which features and design impact usability and user satisfaction.

Methods

This study employed task-based usability testing, including the “think-aloud protocol.” Students at the University of Colorado Boulder completed a series of typical tasks to compare the usability and measure user satisfaction with academic e-books.

For each title, five students completed the tasks on three e-book platforms: the publisher platform and two aggregators. Thirty-five students evaluated seven titles on nine academic e-book platforms.

Results

This study identified each platform’s strengths and weaknesses based on students’ experiences and preferences. The usability tests indicated that students preferred Ebook Central over EBSCO and strongly preferred the aggregators over publisher platforms.

Conclusions

Librarians can use student expectations and preferences to guide e-book purchasing decisions. Preferences may vary by institution, but variations in e-book layout and functionality impact students’ ability to successfully complete tasks and influences their affinity for or satisfaction with any given platform.

Usability testing is a useful tool for gauging user expectations and identifying preferences for features, functionality, and layout.

URL : Academic E-book Usability from the Student’s Perspective

DOI : https://doi.org/10.18438/eblip29457

The Rutgers Open Access Policy goes into effect: Faculty reaction and implementation lessons learned

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Authors : Jane Otto, Laura Bowering Mullen

From laying the groundwork for the successful passage of a university-wide Open Access policy, through the development and planning that goes into a successful implementation, to “Day One” when the official university policy goes into effect, there is a long list of factors that affect faculty interest, participation and compliance.

The authors, Mullen and Otto, having detailed earlier aspects of the Rutgers University Open Access Policy passage and implementation planning, analyze and share the specifics that followed the rollout of the Policy and that continue to affect participation.

This case study presents some strategies and systems used to enhance author self-archiving in the newly minted SOAR (Scholarly Open Access at Rutgers) portal of the Rutgers institutional repository, including involvement of departmental liaison librarians, effective presentation of metrics, and a focus on targeted communication with faculty.

Roadblocks encountered as faculty began to deposit their scholarship and lessons learned are a focus. Early reaction from faculty and graduate students (doctoral students and postdocs) to various aspects of the Policy as well as the use of SOAR for depositing their work are included.

DOI : https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3D50QDM

Authorship Distribution and Collaboration in LIS Open Access Journals: A Scopus based analysis during 2001 to 2015

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Authors : Barik Nilaranjan, Jena Puspanjali

The present study is a bibliometric analysis of some selected open access Library and Information Science (LIS) journals indexed in Scopus database during the period 2001 to 2015. The study has covered 10 LIS open access journals with 5208 publications to establish an idea about the pattern of authorship, research collaboration, collaboration index, degree of collaboration, collaboration coefficient, author’s productivity, ranking of prolific authors etc. of said journals.

Lotkas’s inverse square law has been applied to know the scientific productivity of authors. Results show that, the covered LIS open access journals are dominant with single authorship pattern.

The value of Collaborative Index (0.73), Degree of Collaboration (0.72), and Collaboration Coefficient (0.29) do not show the trend of collaboration. Lotka’s law of author’s productivity is fitting to the present data set.

The country wise distribution of authorship based on the country of origin of the corresponding author shows that 83 countries across the Globe are active in publication of their research in LIS open access journals. United States of America (USA) is the leader country producing of 2822 (54.19%) authors alone.

URL : https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/2033/

Scholarly journals in building and civil engineering – the big picture and current impact of open access

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Author : Bo-Christer Björk

The publishing of scholarly peer reviewed journals has in the past 20 years moved from print to primarily digital publishing, but the subscription-based revenue model is still dominant.

This means that the additional benefits of open access to all scholarly articles still remains a vision, despite some progress. A selection of 72 leading journals in building & construction was studied, in order to determine the current status in this subfield of engineering. Of the approximately 9,500 articles published yearly in these, only some 5,6 % are in the 11 full OA journals included, and a couple of percentage more are paid OA articles in hybrid journals.

In most of the OA journals publishing is free for the authors. In terms of OA maturity, the field lags far behind the situation across all sciences, where at least 15 % of articles are in full OA journals.

If OA is to become more important in our field, the growth is likely to come from major publishers starting new journals funded by author payments (APCs) or converting existing hybrid journals once they have reached a critical share of paid OA articles.

URL : Scholarly journals in building and civil engineering – the big picture and current impact of open access

Alternative location : https://itcon.org/paper/2018/19

Discipline-specific open access publishing practices and barriers to change: an evidence-based review

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Authors : Anna Severin, Matthias Egger, Martin Paul Eve, Daniel Hürlimann

Background

Many of the discussions surrounding Open Access (OA) revolve around how it affects publishing practices across different academic disciplines. It was a long-held view that it would be only a matter of time for all disciplines to fully and relatively homogeneously implement OA.

Recent large-scale bibliometric studies show however that the uptake of OA differs substantially across disciplines. This study investigates the underlying mechanisms that cause disciplines to vary in their OA publishing practices.

We aimed to answer two questions: First, how do different disciplines adopt and shape OA publishing practices? Second, what discipline-specific barriers to and potentials for OA can be identified?

Methods

In a first step, we identified and synthesized relevant bibliometric studies that assessed OA prevalence and publishing patterns across disciplines. In a second step, and adopting a social shaping of technology perspective, we studied evidence on the socio-technical forces that shape OA publishing practices.

We examined a variety of data sources, including, but not limited to, publisher policies and guidelines, OA mandates and policies and author surveys.

Results

Over the last three decades, scholarly publishing has experienced a shift from “closed” access to OA as the proportion of scholarly literature that is openly accessible has increased continuously.

The shift towards OA is however uneven across disciplines in two respects: first, the growth of OA has been uneven across disciplines, which manifests itself in varying OA prevalence levels. Second, disciplines use different OA publishing channels to make research outputs OA.

Conclusions

We conclude that historically grown publishing practices differ in terms of their compatibility with OA, which is the reason why OA can be assumed to be a natural continuation of publishing cultures in some disciplines, whereas in other disciplines, the implementation of OA faces major barriers and would require a change of research culture.

URL : Discipline-specific open access publishing practices and barriers to change: an evidence-based review

DOI : https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.17328.1