Science, institutional archives and open access: an overview and a pilot survey on the Italian cancer research institutions

Background

The Open Archive Initiative (OAI) refers to a movement started around the ’90s to guarantee free access to scientific information by removing the barriers to research results, especially those related to the ever increasing journal subscription prices.

This new paradigm has reshaped the scholarly communication system and is closely connected to the build up of institutional repositories (IRs) conceived to the benefit of scientists and research bodies as a means to keep possession of their own literary production.

The IRs are high-value tools which permit authors to gain visibility by enabling rapid access to scientific material (not only publications) thus increasing impact (citation rate) and permitting a multidimensional assessment of research findings.”

Methods

A survey was conducted in March 2010 to mainly explore the managing system in use for archiving the research finding adopted by the Italian Scientific Institutes for Research, Hospitalization and Health Care (IRCCS) of the oncology area within the Italian National Health Service.

They were asked to respond to a questionnaire intended to collect data about institutional archives, metadata formats and posting of full-text documents. The enquire concerned also the perceived role of the institutional repository DSpace ISS, built up by the Istituto Superiore di Sanita (Italian National Institute of Health, ISS), based on a XML scheme for encoding metadata.

Such a repository aims at acting as a unique reference point for the biomedical information produced by the Italian research institutions. An in-depth analysis has also been performed on the collection of information material addressed to patients produced by the institutions surveyed.

Results

The survey respondents were 6 out of 9. The results reveal the use of different practices and standard among the institutions concerning: the type of documentation collected, the software adopted, the use and format of metadata and the conditions of accessibility to the IRs.

Conclusions

The Italian research institutions in the field of oncology are moving the first steps towards the philosophy of OA. The main effort should be the implementation of common procedures also in order to connect scientific publications to researchers curricula.

In this framework, an important effort is represented by the project of ISS aimed to set a common interface able to allow migration of data from partner institutions to the OA compliant repository DSpace ISS.

URL : http://www.jeccr.com/content/29/1/168

OA Repositories: the Researchers’ Point…

OA Repositories: the Researchers’ Point of View :

“Open access has become very popular over the last few years. It is evident in the increasing number of scientific journals being made available free to readers on the Internet, and the increasing number of institutions that are building repositories to house the electronic versions of open-access articles written by scholars at their institutions. The academic and research communities seem to support this movement and their right to obtain easy and free access to publicly funded scientific information. But, how often do researchers actually use such free publications as readers and how often do they choose to publish in an OA journal or institutional repository? How trustworthy do they consider those journals and repositories? Would they prefer that OA repositories be more selective? Although today about 10-15 percent of scientific peer-reviewed journals are OA] and there are several declarations encouraging institutions to build OA repositories, there is still a long way to go, especially where OA repositories are concerned. This research is trying to determine why acceptance and growth of open access, particularly open access repositories, has been so slow.”

URL : http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0013.304

Academic Search Engine Spam and Google Scholar’s Resilience Against it

In a previous paper we provided guidelines for scholars on optimizing research articles for academic search engines such as Google Scholar. Feedback in the academic community to these guidelines was diverse.

Some were concerned researchers could use our guidelines to manipulate rankings of scientific articles and promote what we call ‘academic search engine spam’. To find out whether these concerns are justified, we conducted several tests on Google Scholar.

The results show that academic search engine spam is indeed—and with little effort—possible: We increased rankings of academic articles on Google Scholar by manipulating their citation counts; Google Scholar indexed invisible text we added to some articles, making papers appear for keyword searches the articles were not relevant for; Google Scholar indexed some nonsensical articles we randomly created with the paper generator SciGen; and Google Scholar linked to manipulated versions of research papers that contained a Viagra advertisement.

At the end of this paper, we discuss whether academic search engine spam could become a serious threat to Web-based academic search engines.

URL : http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0013.305

Traversing The Book of Mpub: an Agile, W…

Traversing The Book of Mpub: an Agile, Web-first Publishing Model :

“In the twenty-first century, content normally lives on the web. But what would a web-based book publishing environment look like? In spring 2010, graduate students at Simon Fraser University created The Book of MPub, an end-to-end, web-first book publishing project. The re-visioning of the book as a web-born entity presents enormous opportunities for publishers to push the operational, expressive, and social horizons of their businesses. We have identified four key concepts which shape a modern book publishing approach: the concept of an agile publishing methodology; the centrality of online content management systems; leveraging the web’s HTML markup as a way of achieving an XML-based workflow; and the radical reconfiguration of promotion and marketing.
The Text is experienced only in an activity, a production. It follows that the Text cannot stop, at the end of a library shelf, for example; the constitutive movement of the Text is a traversal [traversee]: it can cut across a work, several works.”

URL : http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0013.303

The York Digital Journals Project: Strat…

The York Digital Journals Project: Strategies for Institutional Open Journal Systems Implementations :

“Embarking on a university wide journal-hosting initiative can be a resource-intensive undertaking. Providing such a service, however, can be equally rewarding, as it positions the library as both partner and colleague in the publishing process. This paper discusses ideas and strategies for institutional journal hosting gleaned over two years by the York Digital Journals Project. Suggestions for startup including policy considerations and service models are discussed. Ideas for advertising and networking are explored as well as the question of project sustainability.”

URL : http://pi.library.yorku.ca/dspace/handle/10315/4517

Local Transparency – A Practitioners Gui…

Local Transparency – A Practitioners Guide to Publishing New Contracts and Tenders Data

“This guide offers practical help to meet both immediate targets, and to adopt approaches that will add most value for local people and public services over the longer term. It therefore suggests how to meet the requirements for data publication by January 2011, but also offers help in opening up other public data. It describes:
• what data to publish
• how to publish this data online in an open format
• what to consider in publishing; including data protection and licensing
• how to make enable more constructive use of the data as Linked Data.”

URL : http://lgnewcontracts.readandcomment.com/files/2010/12/101122-New-Contracts-Data-Practitioners-Guide-V7.pdf

Technical workshop on the goals and requirements for a pan-European data portal

Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) is a cost framework that can be used to develop and apply local cost models for research data management and long-term preservation. The exact application may depend on the purpose of the costing, which might include:

  • identifying current costs;
  • identifying former or future costs;
  • comparing costs across different collections and institutions which have used different variables;
  • developing a charging policy or appropriate archiving costs to be charged to projects;
  • focussing in more selectively on particular activities and modelling the effect of changes to specific processes.

The major outputs from KRDS have been the project final reports (KRDS 2008 and KRDS 2010) and the supplementary materials to the KRDS2 final report available from the KRDS2 project website (http://www.beagrie.com/jisc.php). The KRDS final reports have been extremely well received by the community. However the project outcomes such as case studies and guidance are now split over two long reports, appendices and supplementary material.

The KRDS User Guide has been developed to support easier assimilation of the combined work of the KRDS1 and KRDS2 projects by those wishing to implement the tools or key findings.

The User Guide is an edited selection and synthesis of the KRDS reports combined with newly commissioned text and illustrations. It provides a succinct summary of key implementation guidance and tools, links to prepared extracts such as case studies from the reports, and additional guidance on its application.

URL : http://www.beagrie.com/KeepingResearchDataSafe_UserGuide_v1_Dec2010.pdf