Access, Readership, Citations: A Randomi…

Access, Readership, Citations: A Randomized Controlled Trial Of Scientific Journal Publishing :

“This dissertation explores the relationship of Open Access publishing with subsequent readership and citations. It reports the findings of a randomized controlled trial involving 36 academic journals produced by seven publishers in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. Between January, 2007 and February, 2008, 712 articles were randomly assigned free access status upon publication from the publisher’s websites (the treatment), leaving 2,533 control articles that were accessible by subscription (the control). Article usage data was gathered from the publishers’ websites and article citations were gathered from ISI’s Web of Knowledge. At the time of this writing, all articles have aged at least two years. Articles receiving the Open Access treatment received significantly more readership (as measured by article downloads) and reached a broader audience (as measured by unique visitors), yet were cited no more frequently, nor earlier, than subscription-access control articles. A pronounced increase in article downloads with no commensurate increase in citations to Open Access treatment articles may be explained through social stratification, a process which concentrates scientific authors at elite, resource-rich institutions with excellent access to the scientific literature. For this community, access is essentially a non-issue. The real beneficiaries of Open Access are the communities that consume, but do not contribute to, the scientific literature. The focus on information consumers requires us to advance the theory of the attention economy. The linear transmission model, where information flows from the sender to the receiver is rejected for a two-sided market model, with authors on one side, readers on the other and journals fulfilling the role of the intermediary agent. The primary purpose of the journal-agent is to transmit quality signals to potential readers. I argue that this model is able to explain both author and reader behaviors as well as the persistent role of journals in an information environment that decouples certification from dissemination.”

URL : http://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/17788

Développement et Usage des Archives Ouvertes en France. 2e partie : Usage

Le rapport présente les résultats d’un projet de recherche mené en 2009 à l’université Charles-de-Gaulle Lille 3. L’objectif du projet : évaluer les résultats de la politique en faveur des archives ouvertes en France. La 2e partie du rapport intitulé « Usage » contient un état de l’art de l’analyse des statistiques d’utilisation des archives ouvertes et fournit quelques éléments chiffrés sur les archives ouvertes en France, à partir de données collectées en ligne sur plusieurs sites. L’enquête est suivie d’une étude de cas, l’analyse des fichiers log de l’archive institutionnelle IRIS de l’université Lille 1.

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00527043/fr/

Institutional Repositories: an Internal …

Institutional Repositories: an Internal and External Perspective on the Value of IRs for Researchers’ Communities :

“Institutional repositories represent extremely innovative technology, but repository managers still struggle to bring together a critical mass of content and to demonstrate their overall impact on research. In this paper I propose a set of Performance Indicators (PIs) to assess institutional repositories’ success. Fourteen internal indicators are selected and inserted in the quadruple ‘balanced scorecard’ perspective. Three more indicators from an external perspective are then proposed and discussed by the author.
I hope that this study will foster the development of standard Performance Indicators for IRs in the very near future, in order to help IR managers to demonstrate their repositories’ cost-effectiveness and success.”

URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/publish/issues/2010-2/index.html?000503

Digital Scholarly Publishing and Archiving Services by Academic Libraries: Case Study of the University of Patras

“During the last years, dramatic changes in the electronic publishing landscape have created new roles and changed the traditional ones. Presently, some libraries have capitalised on their experience and knowledge in information technology and electronic publishing to undertake such activities, while at the same time they spearhead the campaign for Open Access spreading within academic communities.

The Library & Information Centre (LIC) of the University of Patras (UoP), Greece, has been playing an active role in promoting Open Access (OA) in Greece. Since 2007, LIC has been experimenting with OA publishing practices and tools within the framework of various R&D projects. Two of the major results of these efforts are the ‘Pasithee’ e-publishing platform and the ‘Dexamene’ digital archive for Greek scholarly journals. Both platforms are based on OJS-Open Journal Systems e-publishing software. The two facilities were appropriately modified to meet the LIC’s publishing and archiving requirements respectively. Currently two journals are being hosted on each platform and all four are from the Humanities. The LIC is negotiating with more publishers and editorial teams to host their journals.
In this article we focus on:
1. technical and managerial key issues of the development and operation phases,
2. services and procedures,
3. the business model,
4. technological, procedural and legal issues and problems that were encountered when working together with publishers, editors and authors, and
5. future plans for improving and upgrading our e-publishing services into an integrated institutional platform to cover all kinds of publications and data types (monographs, conference proceedings, teaching material, bulletins, magazines etc.).

The article concludes with a succinct presentation of the Directory of Greek Digital Resources, a pilot infrastructure developed by the LIC which indexes and presents digital publishing initiatives in Greece and aims to become a formal registry of Greek scholarly resources in digital format.”

URL : Digital Scholarly Publishing and Archiving Services by Academic Libraries: Case Study of the University of Patras

Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/7991

The Role of an Entity Registry in Schola…

The Role of an Entity Registry in Scholarly Communication: Exploring Creative Uses of Research Activity Data :

“The Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) is the University’s open access repository for research outputs. To simplify deposit in ORA, a registry has been created containing data harvested from existing sources to be used as repository metadata. The registry stores publicly available research activity data, that is, data about research including people, projects, and funders. Data held in the registry are available for purposes beyond the repository, particularly as the registry uses semantic web technologies which expedite data sharing. Value is added by aggregating disparate data for discovery, by making creative use of data such as revealing connections between entities and recording data provenance. This article describes the entity registry, its role within ORA, and as a tool to support scholarly communication. The advantages of storing data as entities and gathering, aggregating, and displaying research activity data to assist dissemination of research are explained. Examples of use of the registry and its data are provided that enable easy discovery of researchers and their activities and reveals hidden connections between them, thereby, encouraging communication and collaboration between different subject areas. Development of the registry and examples has been underpinned by extensive stakeholder analysis and user testing.”

URL : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a928391042~frm=titlelink

From Service Providers to Content Produc…

From Service Providers to Content Producers: New Opportunities For Libraries in Collaborative Open Access Book Publishing :

“Several libraries have become active partners in Open Access publishing of books in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS). Not only have libraries started up their own presses, they are also collaborating with existing presses or forming alliances with other institutions on campus such as scholarly communication offices, ICT departments, and academic research centers. By combining institutional strengths and enabling the sharing of resources across institutions, these collaborations offer synergies and efficiencies in the scholarly book publishing business. This paper examines this new function taken on by libraries. Using research conducted by the European project “Open Access Publishing in European Networks” (OAPEN) on OA publishing models and business models for books, we look at libraries’ motives and challenges and explore how their new roles enable them to serve their customers in the most effective way. By combining digital repositories with scholarly publishing, libraries can facilitate and support HSS book publishing and can help sustain the scholarly monograph in the transition towards digital formats and an Open Access future.”

URL : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a928309305~frm=titlelink

The Economists Online Subject Repository…

The Economists Online Subject Repository—Using Institutional Repositories as the Foundation For International Open Access Growth :

“A new subject repository, Economists Online (EO), has recently been launched. The pioneering model upon which it is built, aggregating the subject specific content of a consortium of participating institutions and their repositories, is examined in this article. An overview of existing subject repositories is given, along with an analysis of the scholarly communications landscape in economics and how the new EO subject repository fits into this environment. This paper makes a case for collaboration between institutional repositories as a way of increasing Open Access (OA) access to research.”

URL : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a928292729~frm=titlelink