EN

Free-riding, cooperation, and ‘peaceful revolutions’ in copyright

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Modern copyright law is based on the inescapable assumption that users, given the choice, will free-ride rather than pay for access. In fact, many consumers of cultural works – music, books, films, games, and other works – fundamentally want to support their production. It turns out that humans are motivated to support cultural production not only by extrinsic incentives, but also by social norms of fairness and reciprocity.

This article explains how producers across the creative industries have used this insight to develop increasingly sophisticated business models that rely on voluntary payments (including pay-what-you-want schemes) to fund their costs of production.

The recognition that users are not always free-riders suggests that current policy approaches to copyright are fundamentally flawed. Because social norms are so important in consumer motivations, the perceived unfairness of the current copyright system undermines the willingness of people to pay for access to cultural goods.

While recent copyright reform debate has focused on creating stronger deterrence through enforcement, increasing the perceived fairness and legitimacy of copyright law is likely to be much more effective.

The fact that users will sometimes willingly support cultural production also challenges the economic raison d’être of copyright law.

This article demonstrates how ‘peaceful revolutions’ are flipping conventional copyright models and encouraging free-riding through combining incentives and prosocial norms. Because they provide a means to support production without limiting the dissemination of knowledge and culture, there is good reason to believe that these commons-based systems of cultural production can be more efficient, more fair, and more conducive to human flourishing than conventional copyright systems.

This article explains what we know about free-riding so far and what work remains to be done to understand the viability and importance of cooperative systems in funding cultural production. »

URL : Free-riding, cooperation, and ‘peaceful revolutions’ in copyright

Alternative location :  : http://eprints.qut.edu.au/70343/

EN

On the Role of Research Data Centres in the Management of Publication-related Research Data

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

This paper summarizes the findings of an analysis of scientific infrastructure service providers (mainly from Germany but also from other European countries). These service providers are evaluated with regard to their potential services for the management of publication-related research data in the field of social sciences, especially economics. For this purpose we conducted both desk research and an online survey of 46 research data centres (RDCs), library networks and public archives; almost 48% responded to our survey. We find that almost three-quarters of all respondents generally store externally generated research data – which also applies to publication-related data.

Almost 75% of all respondents also store and host the code of computation or the syntax of statistical analyses. If self-compiled software components are used to generate research outputs, only 40% of all respondents accept these software components for storing and hosting. Eight out of ten institutions also take specific action to ensure long-term data preservation. With regard to the documentation of stored and hosted research data, almost 70% of respondents claim to use the metadata schema of the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI); Dublin Core is used by 30% (multiple answers were permitted). Almost two-thirds also use persistent identifiers to facilitate citation of these datasets. Three in four also support researchers in creating metadata for their data. Application programming interfaces (APIs) for uploading or searching datasets currently are not yet implemented by any of the respondents. Least common is the use of semantic technologies like RDF.

Concluding, the paper discusses the outcome of our survey in relation to Research Data Centres (RDCs) and the roles and responsibilities of publication-related data archives for journals in the fields of social sciences. »

URL : On the Role of Research Data Centres in the Management of Publication-related Research Data
Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/9356

Non classé

Research libraries’ new role in research data management…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Research libraries’ new role in research data management, current trends and visions in Denmark :

« The amount of research data is growing constantly, due to new technology with new potentials for collecting and analysing both digital data and research objects. This growth creates a demand for a coherent IT-infrastructure. Such an infrastructure must be able to provide facilities for storage, preservation and a more open access to data in order to fulfil the demands from the researchers themselves, the research councils and research foundations.
This paper presents the findings of a research project carried out under the auspices of DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek — Denmark’s Electronic Research Library) to analyse how the Danish universities store, preserve and provide access to research data. It shows that they do not have a common IT-infrastructure for research data management. This paper describes the various paths chosen by individual universities and research institutions, and the background for their strategies of research data management. Among the main reasons for the uneven practices are the lack of a national policy in this field, the different scientific traditions and cultures and the differences in the use and organization of IT-services.
This development contains several perspectives that are of particular relevance to research libraries. As they already curate digital collections and are active in establishing web archives, the research libraries become involved in research and dissemination of knowledge in new ways. This paper gives examples of how The State and University Library’s services facilitate research data management with special regard to digitization of research objects, storage, preservation and sharing of research data.
This paper concludes that the experience and skills of research libraries make the libraries important partners in a research data management infrastructure. »

URL : Research libraries’ new role in research data management, current trends and visions in Denmark
Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/9173

EN

Novel Research Impact Indicators

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Citation counts and more recently usage statistics provide valuable information about the attention and research impact associated with scholarly publications.

The open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS) has pioneered the concept of article-level metrics, where these metrics are collected on a per article and not a per journal basis and are complemented by real-time data from the social web or altmetrics: blog posts, social bookmarks, social media and other.

URL : Novel Research Impact Indicators
Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8427

EN

Bringing Digital Science Deep Inside the Scientific Article: the Elsevier Article of the Future Project

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

The ICT revolution of the last decades impacted scientific communication as it has impacted many other forms of communications, changing the way in which articles are delivered and how they can be discovered.

However, the impact of ICT on the research itself has been much more profound, introducing digital tools to the way in which researchers gather data, perform analyses, and exchange results.

This brought new, digital forms of research output, and disseminating those calls for changes deeply impact the core format of the scientific article.

In 2009, Elsevier introduced the “Article of the Future” project to define an optimal way for the dissemination of science in the digital age, and in this paper we discuss three of its key dimensions.

First we discuss interlinking scientific articles and research data stored with domain-specific data repositories — such interlinking is essential to interpret both article and data efficiently and correctly.

We then present easy-to-use 3D visualization tools embedded in online articles: a key example of how the digital article format adds value to scientific communication and helps readers to better understand research results.

The last topic covered in this paper is automatic enrichment of journal articles through text-mining or other methods. Here we share insights from a recent survey on the question: how can we find a balance between creating valuable contextual links, without sacrificing the high-quality, peer-reviewed status of published articles?

URL : Bringing Digital Science Deep Inside the Scientific Article: the Elsevier Article of the Future Project
Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8446

Non classé

Enhanced Publications Data Models and Information Systems …

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Enhanced Publications: Data Models and Information Systems :

« “Enhanced publications” are commonly intended as digital publications that consist of a mandatory narrative part (the description of the research conducted) plus related “parts”, such as datasets, other publications, images, tables, workflows, devices. The state-of-the-art on information systems for enhanced publications has today reached the point where some kind of common understanding is required, in order to provide the methodology and language for scientists to compare, analyse, or simply discuss the multitude of solutions in the field. In this paper, we thoroughly examined the literature with a two-fold aim: firstly, introducing the terminology required to describe and compare structural and semantic features of existing enhanced publication data models; secondly, proposing a classification of enhanced publication information systems based on their main functional goals. »

URL : Enhanced Publications: Data Models and Information Systems
Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8445

Non classé

A survey of authors publishing in four megajournals

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« Aim. To determine the characteristics of megajournal authors, the nature of the manuscripts they are submitting to these journals, factors influencing their decision to publish in a megajournal, sources of funding for article processing charges (APCs) or other fees and their likelihood of submitting to a megajournal in the future.

Methods. Web-based survey of 2,128 authors who recently published in BMJ Open, PeerJ, PLOS ONE or SAGE Open.

Results. The response rate ranged from 26% for BMJ Open to 47% for SAGE Open. The authors were international, largely academics who had recently published in both subscription and Open Access (OA) journals. Across journals about 25% of the articles were preliminary findings and just under half were resubmissions of manuscripts rejected by other journals. Editors from other BMJ journals and perhaps to a lesser extent SAGE and PLOS journals appear to be encouraging authors to submit manuscripts that were rejected by the editor’s journals to a megajournal published by the same publisher. Quality of the journal and speed of the review process were important factors across all four journals. Impact factor was important for PLOS ONE authors but less so for BMJ Open authors, which also has an impact factor. The review criteria and the fact the journal was OA were other significant factors particularly important for PeerJ authors. The reputation of the publisher was an important factor for SAGE Open and BMJ Open. About half of PLOS ONE and around a third of BMJ Open and PeerJ authors used grant funding for publishing charges while only about 10% of SAGE Open used grant funding for publication charges. Around 60% of SAGE Open and 32% of PeerJ authors self-funded their publication fees however the fees are modest for these journals. The majority of authors from all 4 journals were pleased with their experience and indicated they were likely to submit to the same or similar journal in the future.

Conclusions. Megajournals are drawing an international group of authors who tend to be experienced academics. They are choosing to publish in megajournals for a variety of reasons but most seem to value the quality of the journal and the speed of the review/publication process. Having a broad scope was not a key factor for most authors though being OA was important for PeerJ and SAGE Open authors. Most authors appeared pleased with the experience and indicated they are likely to submit future manuscripts to the same or similar megajournal which seems to suggest these journals will continue to grow in popularity. »

URL : A survey of authors publishing in four megajournals
Alternative URL : https://peerj.com/articles/365/