Blogging by South African academic libra…

Blogging by South African academic librarians: a preliminary survey :
Blogging in South African academic libraries is a relatively new phenomenon. At the time of writing, 28 blogs had been authored by South african academic librarians. A study was conducted of these blogs to establish who these bloggers are and why they are blogging. Several have an experimental air to them. Not all the blogs studied are active and not all have a clear aim or idea of who their audience should be. The most effective blogs seem to be those that invite comments and provide commentary on posts, rather than disabling comments and merely providing links to articles or information.
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18501/

Interconnection among Academic Journal Websites: Multilateral versus Bilateral Interconnection

Electronic academic journal websites provide new services of text and/or datamining and linking, indispensable for efficient allocation of attention among abundant sources of scienti…c information. Fully realizing the benefitt of these services requires interconnection among websites.

Motivated by CrossRef, a multilateral citation linking backbone, this paper performs a comparison between multilateral interconnection through an open platform and bilateral interconnection, and finds that publishers are fully interconnected in the former regime while they can be partially interconnected in the latter regime for exclusion or di¤erentiation motives.

Surprisingly, if partial interconnection arises for di¤erentiation motive, exclusion of small publisher(s) occurs more often under multilateral interconnection. We also find that in the case of multilateral interconnection, a for-profit platform induces less exclusion than an open platform. Various other extensions are analyzed.

URL : https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/medias/doc/wp/io/wp_io_102_2009.pdf

The Pricing of Academic Journals: A Two-…

The Pricing of Academic Journals: A Two-Sided Market Perspective :
More and more academic journals adopt an open-access policy, by which articles are accessible free of charge, while publication costs are recovered through author fees. We study the consequences of this open access policy on a journal’s quality standard. If the journal’s objective was to maximize social welfare, open access would be optimal as long as the positive externalities generated by its diffusion
exceed the marginal cost of distribution. However, we show that if an open access journal has a different objective (such as maximizing readers’ utility, the impact of the journal or its profit), it tends to choose a quality standard below the socially efficient level.
URL : http://bit.ly/d6bjM2

Institutional Repositories Movement in I…

Institutional Repositories Movement in India: Tips & Strategies for Success in the Challenging Times :
The paper highlights the institutional repositories (IRs) movement in India updated till Nov 2009. The paper attempts to identify and evaluate institutional repositories in India with special reference to initiatives taken by twelve DRDO laboratories/establishments including DESIDOC. This paper gives a comprehensive listing of workshops conducted in India to promote development of IRs and also lists institutional repositories developed in India, most of which are available in the public domain. The IRs are identified through a study of the literature, as well as internet searching and browsing. A questionnaire based survey followed by select telephonic interviews were conducted to examine the number of DRDO labs/estts, who have already hosted IRs, and those who intend to do so in the near future. Use of open source software, especially DSpace, is found to be most commonly used for the creation of IRs in India. The collection size in most of the IRs of India is in few hundred records only. IRs face a seemingly endless set of interrelated challenges. Most pertinent questions are: How can we attract content? And how can we integrate IRs into the Institutions landscape? The paper highlights the Indian initiatives in the field of IRs. It provides an overview of the 69 institutional repositories of Indian institutions in a range of subject disciplines. This article highlights software requirements for setting up IRs and the current trends in India. The paper conducts a literature review and questionnaire survey on IRs already established and those planned in near future among DRDO Labs/Estt and to incorporate it with the authors’ own experiences. The authors believe that institutional repositories will help in the sharing of institutional intellectual output and will increase article citations and the impact factors of Indian publications. The LIS professionals should play a proactive role in the growth of e-resources in institutional repositories to enable IRs to become sustainable in the future also. This paper explores some of the challenges and benefits to libraries operating an IR. Lastly, this paper will examine the future of IR’s as it relates to issues in sustainability and viability for institutional repositories.
URL : http://iam.inflibnet.ac.in:8080/dxml/handle/1944/977