A Principled Approach to Online Publicat…

A Principled Approach to Online Publication Listings and Scientific Resource Sharing :
The Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Psycholinguistics has developed a service to manage and present the scholarly output of their researchers. The PubMan database manages publication metadata and full-texts of publications published by their scholars. All relevant information regarding a researcher’s work is brought together in this database, including supplementary materials and links to the MPI database for primary research data. The PubMan metadata is harvested into the MPI website CMS (Plone). The system developed for the creation of the publication lists, allows the researcher to create a selection of the harvested data in a variety of formats.
URL : http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/2520

Sciences et société en interaction sur Internet. Éléments pour une histoire de l’édition électronique en sciences humaines et sociales

Dans l’histoire des rapports complexes qu’entretiennent sciences et société, le développement des réseaux numériques constitue un moment stratégique, que ce soit au niveau de leur développement technique, ou des modifications que ce développement produit sur les formes de la communication scientifique.

Le cas particulier des sciences humaines et sociales met bien en évidence le rôle de médiation que les TIC jouent dans les relations entre sciences et société.

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00439828/en/

Feasibility Study on the AfricaConnect I…

Feasibility Study on the AfricaConnect Initiative :
To be able to fulfil their missions, African research and higher education institutions need access to the global research and education network infrastructure. Unlike their peers on other continents, most African institutions do currently not have such an access.
Within the partnership on Science and Technology, the African and European Union Commissions have
given highest priority to the AfricaConnect initiative as an early deliverable with the objective to support the African research and higher education institutions in their effort to get access to this resource, which is a requirement for the development of knowledge societies. An emerging terrestrial broadband communication infrastructure seems to offer opportunities for African institutions to join.
This one-year feasibility study for AfricaConnect, FEAST, was commissioned by EC late 2008 to explore
the feasibility of deploying a regional backbone connecting dedicated National Research and Education
Networks (NRENs) in Africa to each other and to their peers on other continents via GÉANT, the pan-
European research and education network backbone. The study has been carried out by KTH as main
contractor and DANTE and TERENA as subcontractors. The research leading up to the findings has been conducted via physical visits, workshops and email discussions involving policy makers, regulators, communication operators, infrastructure owners as well as faculty members, students and research and education network communities in about 30 African countries. Many of the contacts come from long-standing institutional and individual cooperation in the areas of research and education.
URL : http://www.feast-project.org/documents/FEAST-Final-Report-2010-03-22.pdf

Open access journal publishing in Ahmadu…

Open access journal publishing in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria :
Open Access has been identified as an initiative that can improve access and provide global visibility for research work conducted by researchers and scholars. This study examined scholarly publication, particularly open access journals in Ahmadu Bello University, Nigeria. Survey research method was adopted for this study and purposive sampling technique was adopted to collect data using
questionnaire from twenty-one chief-editors of scholarly journals published in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. The study revealed, among others that only 2(9.5%) out of the 21(100%) of scholarly journals published in Ahmadu Bello University are open access journals. Lack of awareness of the potentials of open access journals, and concern over copyright issues are some of the challenges
identified by the study hindering the adoption and transition of closed journals to open access journals by publishers of scholarly journals in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. This study also highlights some of the strategies that can be adopted to promote open access journals amongst publishers of scholarly journals in Ahmadu Bello University and Nigeria at large.
URL : http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/papers/ifla76/138-gbaje-en.pdf

Open-Access-Fachrepositorien : OA-Fachre…

Open-Access-Fachrepositorien :
OA-Fachrepositorien ist ein von der DFG gefördertes Projekt der Bibliothek der Universität Konstanz. Ziel ist eine Förderung der Sichtbarkeit und Nutzung der in institutionellen Repositorien zahlreich vorhandenen Dokumente durch eine an den Bedürfnissen der Wissenschaftler orientierte geeignete Einbindung in fachliche Repositorien und andere Zielsysteme, v.a. Fachdatenbanken, die von Fachwissenschaftlern als primäre Sucheinstiege verwendet werden.
URL : http://www.ub.uni-konstanz.de/bibliothek/projekte/open-access-fachrepositorien.html

Evaluation Insights to Key Processes of …

Evaluation Insights to Key Processes of Digital Repositories :
Digital repositories are considered essential information tools for scholarly communication. Their acceptability and extensive use by communities and institutions, as well as the users’ commitment in self-archiving, highlight the need for developing alternative channels of communication to expose scholarly productivity. Furthermore, the digital repositories community is interested into transforming them into viable, reliable and useful systems. This interest is primarily expressed by intense research activity, including – among the others – the evaluation and the usability of the technological solutions that support these services. On an institutional level, digital repositories are systems supported by physical organizations, such as libraries, which undertake many tasks in order to enable a variety of processes associated with these systems, such as submission, editing and access. In this paper, we present a multifaceted evaluation initiative that aimed at the redesign of University of Patras’ institutional repository, namely ‘Nemertes’. ‘Nemertes’ is operating on a DSpace installation and the ‘Theses and Dissertations’ collection was placed at the center of evaluation as the most important collection accommodated in the service. Emphasis was given to key processes held inside the repository by conducting surveys and interviews with typical classes of users. In order to collect data from these sources three different studies were held. First the quality of Submission process inside the physical and the digital space was evaluated through a questionnaire survey, which was addressed to people who had earlier submitted in the ‘Theses and Dissertation’ collection. Secondly, the information retrieval processes and the interface were evaluated by Human-Computer Interaction savvy students using the usability heuristics principles. Finally, the Editing processes and the quality of the delivery of services were assessed through interviews with the librarians that support the service. The findings of these studies point to areas that the system can be improved and help to eliminate the barriers that prohibit the service to be upgraded and host new collections. The areas identified concern both the way of delivering the service and the operation of the system. While the contextual parameters make the generalization of the findings about the service more ambiguous, the findings concerning the system performance and the interface intuitiveness validate the results of previous studies, such as the case of terminology, the affordances and the effectiveness of search interfaces. It is anticipated that the findings of the study can be further exploited by organizations with similar repository services and technological infrastructures.
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18502/