The impact factors of open access and subscription journals across fields

Statut

“We have compared the 2-year and 5-year impact factors (IFs), normalized impact factors (NIFs) and rank normalized impact factors (RNIFs) of open access (OA) and subscription journals across the 22 major fields delineated in Essential Science Indicators. Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2012 has assigned 2-year IF to 1,073 OA and 7,290 subscription journals and 5-year IF to 811 OA and 6,705 subscription journals. Overall 12.8% of journals listed in JCR are OA, but a higher percentage of journals are OA in 9 fields, including multidisciplinary (31%), agriculture (19.1%) and microbiology (19.1). Overall 2-year IF is higher than 5-year IF in a bout 31.5% journals in both OA and subscription journals. But among physics journals , two-thirds of OA journals and 58% of sub-scription journals have a higher 2-year IF. For multidisciplinary journals the mean RNIF is higher for OA journals than subscription journals. Higher proportion of subscription journals had mean
RNIF above 0.5: 361 of 1,073 OA journals (33.6%) and 3,857 of 7,280 subscription journals (52.9%) had a 2-year mean RNIF above 0.5 and 277 of 811 OA journals (34.2%) and 3,453 of 6705 (51.5%) subscription journals had a 5-year mean RINF above 0.5. Moving to OA has proven to be advantageous to developing country journals; it has helped a large number of Latin American and many Indian journals improve their IF.”

URL : http://www.currentscience.ac.in/cs/Volumes/107/03/0380.pdf

The big picture: scholarly publishing trends 2014

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It is important for journal editors to keep up to date with the changes happening in the international journal environment to ensure that their own publications remain current and meet international expectations. Dramatic changes have taken place in the journals environment during the last two decades, frequently driven by technology but also by increased global participation in scholarly and scientific research and concern about the commercial influence on dissemination of knowledge. Technical solutions have attempted to address the growth in research but have sometimes added to the tsunami of information and increased the need to manage quality.

To this end experiments with the traditional quality control and dissemination systems have been attempted, but news of improvements are frequently overshadowed by alarms about ethical problems. There is particular concern about some of the new publishers who are not adhering to established quality control and ethical practices. Within a potentially fragmenting system, however, there are also emerging collaborative projects helping to knit together the different elements of the publishing landscape to improve quality, linkages and access.

URL : The big picture: scholarly publishing trends 2014

Alternative URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.6087/kcse.2014.1.52

Scholarly communication, scholarly publishing and university libraries. Plus ca change ?

Statut

“The scholarly communication and research evaluation landscape is locked into historical paradigms which inadequately reflect the opportunities of the digital era. Why hasn’t the Internet disrupted the practices and the economics of scholarly publishing? The article traces how university library budgets have become dominated by a small number of multinational publishers and attempts at scholarly communication change have only had limited impact, despite the opportunities for increased global distribution of research scholarship. Open access initiatives are assessed in relation to future scholarly communication change in which university libraries play an increasing role in campus scholarly ecosystems.”

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/1885/11944

The dynamic nature of conflict in Wikipedia

Statut

“The voluntary process of Wikipedia edition provides an environment where the outcome is clearly a collective product of interactions involving a large number of people. We propose a simple agent-based model, developed from real data, to reproduce the collaborative process of Wikipedia edition. With a small number of simple ingredients, our model mimics several interesting features of real human behaviour, namely in the context of edit wars. We show that the level of conflict is determined by a tolerance parameter, which measures the editors’ capability to accept different opinions and to change their own opinion. We propose to measure conflict with a parameter based on mutual reverts, which increases only in contentious situations. Using this parameter, we find a distribution for the inter-peace periods that is heavy-tailed. The effects of wiki-robots in the conflict levels and in the edition patterns are also studied. Our findings are compared with previous parameters used to measure conflicts in edit wars.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.4362

The Development of Open Access Repositories in the Asia-Oceania Region: A Case Study of Three Institutions

Statut

“In recent years, open access models of publishing have transcended traditional modes thus enabling freer access to research. This paper takes a trans-regional approach to examining open access publishing in the Asia and Oceania region focussing on three institutions– Charles Darwin University in Australia, University of Hong Kong, and University of Malaya in Malaysia – reflecting on how each is rising, in its own individual way, to meet the range of challenges that its research communities are facing. Specifically, it focuses on open access and institutional repository development, and traces their development at each of the aforementioned institutions. The study is based on interviews conducted with staff involved with the development of each repository, and the open access collection in particular, at each of the three institutions. The findings reveal that each of the three institutions is at a different stage of development, with the University of Hong Kong repository ranked at the top within Asia; each has used a slightly different approach toward open access, and used different software to develop their repository. The authors collate the overall experiences of each institution in open access publishing and repository development, and highlight the successes and failures that each has experienced in reaching the level that they are at today. A series of guidelines, which will be of value to institutions in the region at various levels of development, are presented.”

URL : The Development of Open Access Repositories in the Asia-Oceania Region

Alternative URL : http://library.ifla.org/1043/

La place du livre numérique dans les bibliothèques publiques françaises : État des lieux et prospective

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Auteurs/Authors : Hans Dillaerts, Benoît Epron

L’offre commerciale de livres numériques portée par les éditeurs français est aujourd’hui absente des collections des bibliothèques publiques. Peu de bibliothèques publiques disposent aujourd’hui en effet d’une offre de livres numériques satisfaisante.

Cet article a comme objectif d’analyser plus précisément le contexte français qui est marqué par le déploiement d’un projet d’expérimentation d’un service de prêt du livre numérique (le projet PNB).

En plus d’identifier les freins au développement du prêt du livre numérique, nous mettons ici en avant un certain nombre de facteurs clés de réussite pour l’intégration progressive du livre numérique dans les collections des bibliothèques.

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01032466/fr/

E-Dissertations: Access and Restrictions (EDAR) Survey 2014 Report

Statut

“European and American studies on electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) reveal that one part of digital PhD theses, even if not confidential, is limited to on-campus access and/or under embargo. A French-German research team conducted a survey with a small sample of academic libraries and graduate schools in France and Germany (16,508 theses) on the situation and tendencies from 2009 to 2012. Digital theses represent 38% of the whole sample. 84% digital theses are Open Access while 5% are limited to on-campus access, 2% are under embargo and 1% are confidential. For 9%, data on accessibility are missing. The 84% OA digital theses represent 32% of all theses (print and digital). The survey reveals also differences between France and Germany, especially: France: The part of OA theses compared to all theses increased from 12% of the PhD theses in 2009 to 24% of the PhD theses in 2012. There is an increase of embargoed PhD theses as enforced by the libraries, from 1% of the ETD in 2009 to 7% in 2012. On-campus access restrictions of ETD increased from 5% in 2009 to 28% in 2012. Germany: The number of OA theses increased from 41% of all theses in 2009 to 47% in 2012. Furthermore, very few libraries reported access restrictions. There are however some individual cases – less than 1% – where the author asked for restrictions because of confidential material etc. Following the EDAR project, the project team prepares a proposal for the European Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development. The project “Electronic Theses and Dissertations for Open Access” (ETD4OA) will support the coordination of European infrastructures and open access (OA) policies in the field of electronic theses and dissertations. Together with stakeholders and OA initiatives, it will address barriers and access restrictions, and it will take actions (active communication, recommendations, advice) to promote and develop input, openness and impact of ETD in existing open repositories and portals.”

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01045115/fr/