A Two-Dimensional Approach to Evaluate the Scientific Production of Countries (Case Study: The Basic Sciences)

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The quantity and quality of scientific output of the topmost 50 countries in the four basic sciences (agricultural and biological sciences, chemistry, mathematics, and physics and astronomy) are studied in the period of the recent 12 years (1996-2007). In order to rank the countries, a novel two-dimensional method is proposed, which is inspired by the H-index and other methods based on quality and quantity measures.

The countries data are represented in a “quantity-quality diagram”, and partitioned by a conventional statistical algorithm (k-means), into three clusters, members of which are rather the same in all of the basic sciences. The results offer a new perspective on the global positions of countries with regards to their scientific output.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.2698

Information and Computation

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In this chapter, concepts related to information and computation are reviewed in the context of human computation. A brief introduction to information theory and different types of computation is given. Two examples of human computation systems, online social networks and Wikipedia, are used to illustrate how these can be described and compared in terms of information and computation.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.1428

Sustainability of Open Access Resources The Collective Provision…

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Sustainability of Open Access Resources : The Collective Provision of Open Access Resources :

“This report is the third in a series which examines issues relating to the economic sustainability of critical infrastructure services that support the operation and growth of open-access dissemination of scholarly and scientific research. This report is intended to guide funders and project planners in constructing and coordinating collective funding models capable of supporting open-access infrastructure resources. The report:

  • reviews the fundamentals of robust sustainability modeling (Section 2);
  • outlines the economic and institutional issues that confront those seeking to sustain free infrastructure services and discusses the implications of free models for an initiative’s ability to provide an optimal level of service (Section 3); and
  • dentifies strategies for overcoming institutional free ridership in the design of funding models and describes practical mechanisms for coordinating the collective provision of infrastructure services (Section 4).”

URL : http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/collective-provision-of-oa-services.pdf

Institutional Repositories and Open Access Initiatives in Bangladesh…

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Institutional Repositories and Open Access Initiatives in Bangladesh: A New Paradigm of Scholarly Communication :

“Nowadays, open access (OA) in its diverse forms constitutes the most interesting and promising model for the research output of an academic or research institution. The purpose of the present study is to discuss the situation of OA in the developing world, with a focus on Bangladesh. The study also addresses why OA is important for developing countries and which initiatives have been taken in Bangladesh. Finally, we discuss some challenging issues of OA and suggestions on how to overcome these issues. It is rather obvious that developing countries have always faced a lack of research information and were unable to afford sufficient subscriptions to journals. The other side of the picture is the poor dissemination of the research outcome in the developing world. In Bangladesh, only three organizations have their institutional repository and have a reasonable number of local OA journals. We will identify some problems that impede the process of building open access IR, or more generally an OA environment in Bangladesh. We are convinced, however, that we will witness in the near future a sustainable growth of open access initiatives, with more open access literature and digital repositories.”

URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8245

Anatomy of Green Open Access Open Access…

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Anatomy of Green Open Access :

“Open Access (OA) is the free unrestricted access to electronic versions of scholarly publications. For peer reviewed journal articles there are two main routes to OA, publishing in OA journals (gold OA) or archiving of article copies or manuscripts at other web locations (green OA). This study focuses on summarizing and extending upon current knowledge about green OA. A synthesis of previous studies indicates that the green OA coverage of all published journal articles is approximately 12%, with substantial disciplinary variation. Typically, green OA copies become available with considerable time delays, partly caused by publisher imposed embargo periods, and partly by author tendencies to archive manuscripts only perio dically. Although green OA copies should ideally be archived in proper repositories, a large share is stored on home pages and similar locations, with no assurance of long-term preservation. Often such locations contain exact copies of published articles, which may infringe on the publisher’s exclusive rights. The technical foundation for green OA uploading is becoming increasingly solid, which is largely due to the rapid increase in the number of institutional repositories. The number of articles within th e scope of OA mandates, which strongly influence the self-archival rate of articles, is nevertheless still low.”

URL : http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc8/Personal%20VersionGreenOa.pdf