Disciplinary differences in faculty research data management practices…

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Disciplinary differences in faculty research data management practices and perspectives :

“Academic librarians are increasingly engaging in data curation by providing infrastructure (e.g., institutional repositories) and offering services (e.g., data management plan consultations) to support the management of research data on their campuses. Efforts to develop these resources may benefit from a greater understanding of disciplinary differences in research data management needs. After conducting a survey of data management practices and perspectives at our research university, we categorized faculty members into four research domains—arts and humanities, social sciences, medical sciences, and basic sciences—and analyzed variations in their patterns of survey responses. We found statistically significant differences among the four research domains for nearly every survey item, revealing important disciplinary distinctions in data management actions, attitudes, and interest in support services. Serious consideration of both the similarities and dissimilarities among disciplines will help guide academic librarians and other data curation professionals in developing a range of data-management services that can be tailored to the unique needs of different scholarly researchers.”

URL : http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/8.2.5

Datasharing guía práctica para compartir datos de investigación…

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Datasharing: guía práctica para compartir datos de investigación :

“Asociar los datos de investigación a la publicación favorece que la comunidad científica los reutilice, pero no tiene suficientes garantías de preservación. Almacenarlos en bases de datos solventa esta contingencia y aporta visibilidad, pero en España no existen demasiados servicios de estas características. Por esta razón, se describen, evalúan y exponen los pros y contras de depósitos de datos multidisciplinares extranjeros que pueden ser de utilidad para investigadores y gestores de información: Dryad, Figshare, Zenodo y Dataverse. Todavía es pronto para escoger de forma óptima y definitiva entre una u otra aplicación, por lo que se concluye con unas recomendaciones que orienten a la comunidad de usuarios e intermediarios.”

“To associate research data to the published results favors their reuse by the scientific community, but this does not afford sufficient guarantees of preservation. To store them in databases solves this contingency and provides visibility, but in Spain there are not many services of this kind. For this reason, we describe, evaluate and discuss the pros and cons of foreign multidisciplinary data repositories that can be useful for researchers and information managers: Dryad, Figshare, Zenodo and Dataverse. It is still early to choose optimally and definitively one or the other application, so we conclude with recommendations to guide the user community and intermediaries.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/20907/

The Open Access Movement is Not Really about…

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The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access :

“While the open-access (OA) movement purports to be about making scholarly content open-access, its true motives are much different. The OA movement is an anti-corporatist movement that wants to deny the freedom of the press to companies it disagrees with. The movement is also actively imposing onerous mandates on researchers, mandates that restrict individual freedom. To boost the open-access movement, its leaders sacrifice the academic futures of young scholars and those from developing countries, pressuring them to publish in lower-quality open-access journals. The open-access movement has fostered the creation of numerous predatory publishers and standalone journals, increasing the amount of research misconduct in scholarly publications and the amount of pseudo-science that is published as if it were authentic science.”

URL : http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/525

Opening the Dissertation Overcoming Cultural Calcification and Agoraphobia…

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Opening the Dissertation: Overcoming Cultural Calcification and Agoraphobia :

“This article places the struggle to open access to the dissertation in the context of the crisis in doctoral education and the transition from print to digital literacy. It explores the underlying cultural calcification and agoraphobia that deter engagement with openness. Solving the problems will require overhauling the curriculum and conventions of doctoral education. Opening access to dissertations is an important first step, but insufficient to end the crisis. Only opening other dimensions of the dissertation – the structure, media, notion of authorship, and methods of assessment – can foster the digital literacy needed to save PhD programs from extinction. If higher education institutions invested heavily in remedying obsolete practices, the remedies would reverberate throughout the academy, accelerate advancement in the disciplines, and revolutionize scholarly publishing. The article ends with a discussion of the significant role librarians could play in facilitating needed changes given appropriate institutional commitment.”

URL : http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/522

The Diamond Model of Open Access Publishing: Why Policy Makers, Scholars, Universities, Libraries, Labour Unions and the Publishing World Need to Take Non-Commercial, Non-Profit Open Access

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This reflection introduces a new term to the debate on open access publishing: diamond open access (DOA) publishing. The debate on open access is a debate about the future of academia.

We discuss the problems of for-profit academic publishing, such as monopoly prices and access inequalities and point at the limits of contemporary perspectives on open access as they are frequently advanced by the publishing industry, policy makers and labour unions.

The article introduces a public service and commons perspective that stresses the importance of fostering and publicly supporting what we term the model of diamond open access.

It is a non-profit academic publishing model that makes academic knowledge a common good, reclaims the common character of the academic system and entails the possibility for fostering job security by creating public service publishing jobs.

Existing concepts such as “gold open access” have serious conceptual limits that can be overcome by introducing the new term of diamond open access. The debate on open access lacks visions and requires social innovations.

This article is a policy intervention and reflection on current issues related to open access (OA) publishing. It reflects on the following questions:

  • What should the role of open access be in the future of academic publishing and academia?
  • How should the future of academic publishing and academia look like?
  • Which reforms of academic policy making are needed in relation to open access publishing?

We want to trigger a new level of the open access debate. We invite further reflections on these questions by academics, policy makers, publishers, publishing workers, labour unions, open access publishing associations, editors and librarians.

URL : http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/502
Un résumé français de l’article est accessible sur http://oadesk.hypotheses.org/298 (ce résumé a été rédigé par Benjamin Caraco)

Public Libraries in the Knowledge Society: Core Services of Libraries in Informational World Cities

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Informational Cities are the prototypical spaces of the knowledge society. Public libraries play an important role as parts of the digital, smart, knowledge and creative infrastructures of these Informational Cities. Libraries have economic value as location factors in the two spaces of Informational Cities, the physical and the digital. For this reason, we divided the library services into two main groups, namely the digital library and the physical library.

For 31 specified Informational World Cities, we empirically analyzed the core services of their public libraries via content analysis of the libraries’ Web pages. Additionally, we studied these libraries’ social media activities. Many libraries provide free e-resources (above all, e-books, e-journals and bibliographical databases) to their customers.

Libraries offer digital reference services, mainly via e-mail and Web forms. Their presence in social media is dominated by posts on Facebook and Twitter. Nearly all public libraries we analyzed represent attractive architectural landmarks in their region. Besides offering spaces for children, the libraries provide rooms for learning and getting together and, to a lesser degree, modular working spaces. Most libraries provide Wi-Fi inside their buildings; more than half of those we investigated work with RFID technology.

The prototypical public library in the knowledge society has two core services: (1) to support citizens, companies and administrations in their city and region with digital services, namely e-resources as well as reference services, and to communicate with their customers via social media; and (2) to provide physical spaces for meeting, learning and working, as well as areas for children and other groups, in a building that is a landmark of the city.

URL : http://www.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/fileadmin/Redaktion/Institute/Informationswissenschaft/siebenlist/Lehre/PS_I2/libri-2013-0024_63-4-295-319_Mainka_Stock.pdf

Multidimensional Journal Evaluation of PLOS ONE PLOS

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“PLOS ONE (formerly PLoS ONE) is an international open access online journal published by the Public Library of Science. The periodical covers all science and medicine categories and has published as many as 28,852 documents from 2007 to 2011. PLOS ONE will be used to show the range of journal metrics and informetric methods regarding validity, practicability and informative value. To assess this data as specifically as possible and to address all relevant factors, the evaluation is split into five dimensions, each of which involves distinct metrics. The five dimensions are journal output, journal content, journal perception, journal citations and journal management. Each of them is pointed out in the process of the analyses, and all significant evaluation results are presented. The results show that PLOS ONE has experienced an enormous development. Because of a relatively low rejection rate of 31%, its openness towards a multitude of different research areas, an internationally large peer review community, and its open access, a plurality of documents can be published in comparison with a print-journal or other online periodicals. The results of the evaluation indicate that PLOS ONE should be assessed from numerous perspectives because there are a variety of indicators beyond the impact factor that can be made use of in order to evaluate exhaustively the standing of the journal as well as its prestige and impact.”

URL : http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/libr.2013.63.issue-4/libri-2013-0021/libri-2013-0021.xml?format=INT